Henry Beston

Born in 1888 and living until 1968, Henry Beston was an American writer and naturalist whose reputation rests above all on The Outermost House (1928), a book drawn from time he spent in a small cottage on the outer beach of Cape Cod. The work became a classic of American nature writing and remains closely tied to the spirit and landscape of what is now Cape Cod National Seashore.

Beston saw himself as a "writer-naturalist," aiming to bring literary grace to careful observation of the natural world. His writing is known for its attentiveness to weather, sea, birds, light, and seasonal change, and for the sense that human life is only one part of a much larger living community.

He later married the writer Elizabeth Coatsworth and continued to write about the natural world in books including Northern Farm. Readers who come to Beston today often find that his work feels both vivid and modern: patient, humane, and deeply alert to the value of wild places.