Letters from Erastus - Historic Northampton Museum and Education Center

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Letters from Erastus: Field Notes on Grace

Book Launch, Reading and Booksigning
with author Anne D. Emerson

Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 7 pm

Levellers Press of Amherst, Massachusetts announces the publication of Letters from Erastus: Field Notes on Grace by Anne D. Emerson.

Erastus Hopkins of Northampton was a founder of the Free Soil Party in Massachusetts, a stirring orator and an effective legislator for western Massachusetts on Beacon Hill. He was often mentioned as a possible candidate for governor. A Presbyterian minister in a sea of Congregationalists, Hopkins was also founding president of the Connecticut River Railroad and an active agent on the Underground Railroad.

Letters from Erastus: Field Notes on Grace, written by his great-great granddaughter Anne D. Emerson of Boston, is woven around 22 letters written by Hopkins to his daughters in the 1850s and 60s.

The letters reveal an unexpected sensitivity and attempt to provide firm but gentle guidance to a family coping with years of domestic tragedy. Buried for 150 years in the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the letters become a bridge to Linc, a schizophrenic cousin in prison, and a guide for the author’s understanding of her own life story and old New England family. While this is a book full of engaging history, it is also a contemporary story, about a family of artists, the interplay of generations and values, and the ways we search for and find meaning as we move through the chapters of life. At right is a portrait of Erastus Hopkins who through his rediscovered letters spoke again to a new generation.
In all the many hours I’ve spent reading the religious diaries and letters of 18th- and 19th-century New Englanders, or reading scholars’ studies of personal religion, I’ve never come across someone who penetrated the core of their inner lives so well as Anne Emerson has done with Erastus Hopkins. In this amazing book, she deepens her own exploration of a life of love and loss by engaging Hopkins’ remarkable faith in the face of family tragedy and a young cousin’s equally profound descent into schizophrenia and violence. As readers, we inhabit these three spiritual worlds at once, and come away enthralled by the exercise.
- Richard Rabinowitz, author of The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Northeastern University Press, 1989)
Anne D. Emerson was the executive director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1988 to 1998, and after that served as director of the Bostonian Society and the Old State House Museum and as president of the Boston Museum Project. She is married to Peter Altman, founding artistic director of the Huntington Theater. Her articles on historical topics have been published in The Boston Globe. This is her first book.
*Letters from Erastus* is available on April 15, 2015 at the Off the Common Bookshop at Collective Copies, Amherst and online at www.levellerspress.com and on www.amazon.com.
ISBN: 978-1-137946-70-2 - $19.95

The book event is free and open to the public and will take place
in Historic Northampton's Damon Education Center
at 46 Bridge Street in downtown Northampton.