Culture of New England
New England is the oldest region of the United States and one of the first successful English settlements in the Americas, and it has a long and oft-contested cultural history.
Its identity has been encoded in narratives about its past—stories that have been continually revised in response to new interpretive needs generated by the transformations of regional life[, helping] New Englanders negotiate, traditionalize, and resist change.
New England cuisine has a reputation for its emphasis on seafood and dairy; clam chowder, lobster, and other products of the sea are among some of the region's most popular foods.
Pulitzer Prize winning poets Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert P. T. Coffin were born in Maine.
Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever, a novelist and short story writer, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, and set most of his fiction in old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around there.
Real New England towns such as Ipswich, Newburyport, Rowley, and Marblehead featured often in his stories alongside fictional locations such as Dunwich, Arkham, Innsmouth and Kingsport.
Lovecraft often expressed an appreciation for New England in his personal correspondence, and believed that returning to the area was the reason that his writing improved after he left New York City.
The region has also drawn authors and poets from other parts of the U.S. Mark Twain thought Hartford was the most beautiful city in the U.S.[citation needed] He made it his home, and wrote his masterpieces there.
John Updike, originally from Pennsylvania, eventually moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which served as the model for the fictional New England town of Tarbox in his 1968 novel Couples.
Robert Frost was born in California, but moved to Massachusetts during his teen years and published his first poem in Lawrence; his frequent use of New England settings and themes ensured that he would be associated with the region.
Herman Melville, originally from New York City, bought the house now known as Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and there wrote his greatest novel Moby-Dick.
Charles Simic, who was born in Belgrade, Serbia (at that time Yugoslavia) grew up in Chicago and lives in Strafford, New Hampshire, on the shore of Bow Lake.
Just to the south, Exeter, New Hampshire, was the birthplace of best-selling novelist John Irving and Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code.
Rick Moody has set many of his works in southern New England, focusing on wealthy families of suburban Connecticut's Gold Coast and their battles with addiction and anomie.
Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy, whose novel No Country for Old Men was made into the Academy Award for Best Picture winning film in 2007, was born in Providence, although he moved to Tennessee when he was a boy.
New York Times Bestselling author Dennis Lehane, another native of the Boston area, who was born in Dorchester, wrote the novels that were adapted into the films Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island.
Largely on the strength of its local writers, Boston was for some years the center of the U.S. publishing industry, before being overtaken by New York in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Traditional knitting, quilting and rug hooking circles in rural New England have become less common; church, sports, and town government are more typical social activities.
During the warm summer months, outdoor activities such as fishing, hiking, swimming, pickup sports, and pleasure boating are crucial to many New Englanders.
Mass seasonal migrations from the cities to the rural and coastal areas occur each summer, with Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Cape Cod being among the most common destinations.
In an unsigned item in the July 23, 1884 edition of The New York Times, it was reported derisively that Ralph Waldo Emerson "was accustomed to eating pie at breakfast.
[21] Most of Connecticut, save for Windham county in the state's northeast corner, and even southern Rhode Island, receives the YES Network, which broadcasts the games of the New York Yankees.
A number of Saturday Night Live (SNL) cast members have origins in New England, from Adam Sandler to Amy Poehler, who also stars in the NBC television series Parks and Recreation.
Notable stand-up comedians, including Dane Cook, Steve Sweeney, Steven Wright, Sarah Silverman, Lisa Lampanelli, Denis Leary, Lenny Clarke, and Louis CK, are also from the region.
SNL cast member Seth Meyers once attributed the region's imprint on American humor to its "sort of wry New England sense of pointing out anyone who's trying to make a big deal of himself", with the Boston Globe suggesting that irony and sarcasm, as well as Irish influences, are its trademarks.
