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Book Description

Mary E. Folsom Blair was just a name on a listing sheet when young writer Phil Primack bought her Epping, New Hampshire, property in 1974. As he learned more about this lifelong teacher, Quaker, and early advocate for outdoor education, his reporter bones began to twitch. Over decades, Primack talked to her former students and relatives, tracking down Mary’s most accurate life record: letters and journals dating 1897, when she was fifteen. Her sharp mind and creative soul grapple with the social restraints of her time and “the pain this world holds for a woman.” Mary pens her hopes and bares her despair as young chums die, her classroom ways are challenged, relationships with men and women end until—resigned to her fate as “spinster that was, is and ever shall be”—she meets her Hero on ice. With her collected papers preserved at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Mary Folsom Blair will teach in a digital forever.

Author’s Note

Phil Primack wrote for newspapers from Boston to Appalachia including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. He has taught journalism and has been a policy adviser and consultant to government agencies and non-profit organizations. He is the author of New England Country Fair.

Commentary

Put It Down on Paper is the charming, poignant tale of Phil Primack’s unflagging search for the woman who would otherwise have been lost to history—and of that woman’s fortitude and passion. Mary Folsom Blair comes to us directly, in her diary, where she speaks with courage and candor of her love of nature and of writing. Part detective story, part coming of age tale, and part journal, this is a chronicle of a writer’s need to know and a woman’s resilience told with grace, wit, and intelligence. A joy.

—Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation

From dusty school records and family interviews to scratchings on cabin walls, Phil Primack has gleaned the puzzle pieces of Mary Folsom Blair’s life and fit them together into a compelling biography. He often lets Blair tell her own story, adding just the right amount of his own speculation and explanation. Introspective, self-aware, sometimes wry, Blair emerges as an unforgettable woman who loved deeply and lived richly.

—Kathryn Allamong Jacob, former Curator of Manuscripts, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Research, Harvard University