Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), one of the foremost local color writers in America, wrote exclusively about her native Maine--its landscape, its people, and its fading rural traditions. Her unsentimental, humorous, and deeply affectionate stories and sketches provide a realistic picture of a bygone time that is based on Jewetts family, neighbors, and personal experience, but that is filtered through the consciousness of an extremely gifted and observant fiction writer.