Gerald Warner Brace (September 24, 1901 – July 20, 1978) was an American novelist, writer, educator, sailor and boat builder.
He was born on September 24, 1901, in Islip, Long Island, Suffolk County, New York, and died on July 20, 1978, at Blue Hill, Maine.
He is the grandson of Letitia Neill of Belfast, Ireland and Charles Loring Brace,[16] Yale College 1846, who was a contributing philanthropist in the field of social reform.
His wife was Lucy Porter, the sister-in-law of Lyman Beecher, Yale College, 1797 and a descendant of politician, and diplomat Rufus King, who was one of the signers of the United States Constitution.
[2] Though he lived in a century of industrialization and technology, and rapid social change, he dreamt of sailing ships, lonely country farms, and romantic adventures.
[23] He became acquainted with the harsh life of the rural people who lived on the back country roads, subconsciously gathering subject matter for his novels.
[2][24] Hoping to learn more about boat design, Gerald entered a graduate program in Architecture at Harvard, but he soon realized that he was in the wrong field.
[2] After he received his Master's Degree, he was offered a teaching position at Williams College where he added a passion for skiing to his enjoyment of long mountain hikes.
[2] Laconic in his ways, he woke early to write, to shape words that spoke his sense of what Maine stood for against the ebbing of old New England.
He always looked for the old ways, the remnants of the past in action ... and though he knew life and the world were harsh and often tragic, he had a conviction that old New England had once discovered a classic serenity that could still be perceived.
A writer, sailor, boat designer, and teacher, he introduced readers to seafaring folk and farmers, townspeople and "summer people," and has made us see them, their lives, and their background.
In his novel, The Garretson Chronicle, depicting three generations of a Massachusetts family, he deals with satirizing the decline of Emersonain New England, and the battle with the mountain (a modern version of Moby Dick).
The Wayward Pilgrims is a novel about a young university instructor, traveling around the state of Vermont, who meets an older woman, at a train depot, who teaches him about her experiences in life.
The narrator of the novel is Robert "Sandy" Sanderling, a professor of American literature with a degree from Harvard, who is planning his retirement speech.
Looking back over his life, he feels that he has accomplished very little and his one novel, Aftermath was not the book he had hoped it would be; his marriage was a disaster; he has no real friends in his department, and the profession of teaching and the field of scholarship have changed and left him behind.