Joseph C. Lincoln

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Joseph Crosby Lincoln, (born February 13, 1870 in Brewster, Massachusetts died March 10, 1944 in Winter Park, Florida) was an American author of novels, poems, and short stories, many set in a fictionalized Cape Cod. Lincoln's work frequently appeared in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and The Delineator. Although Lincoln was aware of his contemporary naturalist writers like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser who used American literature to plumb the depths of human nature, he rejected this literary exercise. Lincoln claimed that he was satisfied "spinning yarns" that made readers feel good about themselves and their neighbors.

Although Lincoln was born on Cape Cod, his mother moved the family to Chelsea, Massachusetts, a manufacturing city outside of Boston, after the death of Lincoln's father. Lincoln's literary career celebrating "old Cape Cod" can partly be seen as an attempt to return to an Eden from which he had been driven by family tragedy. Lincoln's literary portrayal of Cape Cod can also be understood as a premodern haven occupied by individuals of old Yankee stock which was offered to readers as an antidote to an America that was undergoing rapid modernization, urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. Lincoln was a Republican and a Universalist.

Upon becoming successful, Lincoln spent his winters in northern New Jersey, near the center of the publishing world in Manhattan, but summered in Chatham, Massachusetts. In Chatham, Lincoln lived in a shingle-style house named "Crosstrees" that was located on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.