"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
More pictures and cards of Egg Rock are posted at a North Shore Community College site on the Poetry of Places in Essex County. Elsewhere in Nahant, one resident has posted a sterling selection of vintage Howard Johnson's images, while another writes of the pleasures of summering in town. (A recurring fantasy while I am mowing the lawn in the summer heat is to live where the ocean is no more than five minutes' walk in any direction.)
Nahant is haunted by several ghosts, including that of a tragic lover whose plaintive wail evokes lost romance as well as a touch of the Marx Brothers:
Around the autumn of 1815, an Italian named Faustino rowed out to Egg Rock to pick some unusual flowers for his fiancee, Alice. However, a squall came up and Faustino drowned trying to return to shore. Alice's ghost can still be heard at the rocks of Nahant calling, "Faustino! Faustino!"
Boston's Gold Coast began with Nahant, summer home to the Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, painted there by John Singer Sargent. A social history has been written of summers among the rich and eccentric on the North Shore. An 1896-97 painting of Nahant excursionists was included in a show at the Met.
Meantime, living the Wicked Good Life a little way up the coast in New Hampshire is Ever So Humble, whose New England-flavored blog, sort of a mirabilis.nh, if you will, is well worth a visit (and whose discerning blurb accompanying a link here, posted at left, is happily received).