Moore, Ruth

(1903-1989) In the winter of 1947, the year of the devastating fires, Ruth Moore returned “from away” to the Mount Desert Region where she had spent her childhood. She had come home to build a house for herself together with writer-friend, Eleanor Mayo. Although, as an article in a Portland newspaper pointed out, “their knowledge of house construction then extended merely to the ability to pound a nail,” the two highly successful yet unpretentious authors took on the task with typical Downeast practicality. With used lumber, and a little advice here and there, they raised the small house which stands today on a beautiful piece of property overlooking Bass Harbor Head.

For Moore, who had been away for 26 years, it was an important turning point in her career. She had just sold the movie rights to her second novel, Spoonhandle. Although she thought Hollywood had “butchered” her novel of life on a Maine coastal island, she now had the freedom to write.

With two novels already to her credit, Moore produced 12 more plus two books of poetry during the 42 years she spent at her home at Bass Harbor Head. Almost all focused on the Maine coastal communities she knew and loved. Although she often stated that none of the characters in her books were real people, the power of her fiction lies in the reality of her settings, dialogue, and characterization.

Moore was born on Gott’s Island at the mouth of Blue Hill Bay, July 21, 1903. The island is part of the town of Tremont, off shore from its southern tip.

The second of four children, she represented the fifth generation of Moores to be born on the island. Her father did a little farming, ran the general store and the post office, kept lobster traps, and tended the last herring weir to be fished on the island.

Moore attended the island’s elementary school. She exhibited a love of reading early and read the entire family bookcase as a supplement to her school books. Since there was no secondary school on Gott’s Island, she went on to Ellsworth High School on the mainland and boarded with relatives.

Being an island girl, she suffered the prejudice of some mainland children and even teachers who looked down on the islanders as being inferior. It was also during her high school years that Moore first began to recognize the changes slowly taking place on her island home as the local population there dwindled and the summer people began to take over.

Graduating from high school in 1921, she went to New York State College for Teachers in Albany, New York. There, under the guidance of one of her English teachers,  she cultivated her desire to write. She graduated in 1925 and moved to New York City but soon discovered that she disliked teaching. She had various secretarial jobs, did some publicity work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and worked in the offices of various magazines such as Antiques and American Girl.

A break came in 1936 when she was recommended by one of her editors to the writer Alice Tisdale Hobart who brought her to California and employed her as a manuscript typist and assistant. While there, Moore did some writing of her own and published a short story in The New Yorker. In a climate so unfamiliar to a coastal Maine native, she began work on her first novel, The Weir. Based on her childhood experiences on Gott’s Island, The Weir was about the disintegration of a fishing and farming community on the fictional Comey’s Island.

“I began to write that story as a way of escaping from that awful [California] weather,” Moore stated in a 1987 article by David E. Philips in Down East magazine. “You can’t imagine how homesick I was for snow. I remember how many times I would get up from the typewriter, go to the window, look up at the snow-capped peaks of the high Sierras, and just stand there with tears rolling down my cheeks.”

By 1941, Moore had tired of California. She returned to New York and became an associate editor at Reader’s Digest while working at The Weir at night and on weekends. It was rejected by almost 25 editors before being accepted by William Morrow and Company. Published in 1943, it sold 10,000 copies and earned considerable critical acclaim. She followed three years later with Spoonhandle, perhaps her best known work.

Once again, fictional Maine islands drawn heavily from real life served as the setting for the story. Spoonhandle is about an island family and the conflicts that arise between them and their community. It sold over a million copies and was made into a major motion picture by 20th Century Fox called “Deep Waters,” filmed on Vinalhaven. Moore was paid $50,000 for the screen rights and was signed on by the studio with a seven-year contract for more of her stories. Disgusted with the mivie’s interpretation of her book, Moore canceled her contract and returned to Maine in 1947 to build her house and to write full time.

A retiring, quite person who shunned publicity, Moore usually worked four to six hours a day on her writing, taking vacations in between books and tending her garden in the summers. At the height of her popularity during the fifties and sixties, her books were selected by major book clubs and translated into several languages.

Although she set most of them in Maine, Moore felt that her stories of families like the Stilwells in Spoonhandle or the Turners in The Weir could have taken place anywhere in America. She considered the little world of Gott’s Island, which had been totally surrendered to the summer people by the time she moved back to Maine, to be a microcosm of the world. By fictionalizing the growing pains of coastal Maine communities, she was telling the story of small town America as it grew and changed and faced new challenges.

By 1983, her books were out of print and might have been lost to obscurity had it not been for the efforts of enthusiastic supporters such as singer Gordon Bok, who recorded some of her ballads, and Blackberry Press publisher Gary Lawless, who embarked on a campaign to bring her books back into print. In 1986, he issued a reprint edition of The Weir and, just as Moore had, followed it up with Spoonhandle in 1987. He has since secured the rights to reissue all of her works.

Shortly before her death in December of 1989, Lawless visited Moore at her home to make the plans for a book of her poetry and to discuss the reprinting of two more novels. Although she seemed to be tiring, says Lawless, he noted that she still had a piece of paper in her typewriter and was at work. Three days later she died. She was 86.

“The republishing of her work and the revival of interest in her has been a great gift,” Lawless later wrote. “We have lost her voice but her spirit, her gift remains with us. We will always have her work, and through it we have a record of life in Maine’s coastal fishing communities, a life now lost to us.”

Source: Education, Maine Department of. Maine’s Claim to Fame: A Gallery of Personalities. Augusta. 1990. (condensed and edited)

Additional resources

Moore, Ruth. High Clouds Soaring, Storms Driving Low: The Letters of Ruth Moore. Edited, and with an introduction by, Sanford Phippen. Nobleboro, Me. Blackberry Press. 1993.