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The last days of Dogtown : a novel / Anita Diamant.

by Diamant, Anita.

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Scribner, c2005.

Dogtown Commons (Gloucester, Mass.) -- Fiction.

Gloucester (Mass.) -- Fiction.

Massachusetts -- History -- Fiction.

263 p. ; 25 cm.

"Set on Cape Ann in the early 1800s, The Last Days of Dogtown is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and "witches." Nearly a decade ago, Diamant found an account of an abandoned rural backwater near the Massachusetts coastline at the turn of the nineteenth century. That pamphlet inspired a stunning novel about a small group of eccentrics and misfits, struggling in a harsh, isolated landscape only fifty miles north of Boston, yet a world away. Among the inhabitants of Dogtown are Black Ruth, an African woman who dresses as a man and works as a stone mason; Mrs. Stanley, an imperious madam whose grandson, Sammy, comes of age in her rural brothel; Oliver Younger, who survives a miserable childhood at the hands of a very strange aunt; and Cornelius Finson, a freed slave whose race denies him everything. At the center of it all is Judy Rhines, a fiercely independent soul, deeply lonely, who nonetheless builds a life for herself and inspires those around her to become more generous and tolerant themselves. This is a story of hardship and resilience -- and an extraordinary re-creation of an untold chapter of early American life."--Inside jacket.

Historical fiction.

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