author

Philip Dana Orcutt

A World War I ambulance driver turned author and researcher, he wrote from firsthand experience and later explored American history in print. His work moves between the urgency of the front lines and a deep interest in place, memory, and the past.

1 Audiobook

The White Road of Mystery: The Note-Book of an American Ambulancier

The White Road of Mystery: The Note-Book of an American Ambulancier

by Philip Dana Orcutt

About the author

Philip Dana Orcutt is best known for The White Road of Mystery (1918), a firsthand account of his service as an ambulance driver with Section XXXI of the American Field Service during World War I. The book stands out for its close-up view of wartime life and the people who lived through it.

Later, Orcutt also wrote The Moffatt-Ladd House: Its Garden and Its Period, 1763, Portsmouth, New Hampshire (1935), showing a strong interest in historic buildings and local history. Library records also connect him with collecting and donating ethnographic objects to Harvard's Peabody Museum.

Some biographical details are hard to confirm from readily available sources, but he appears in historical records as the son of writer and book designer William Dana Orcutt. A mountaineering biography of Christine Reid also notes that she married Philip Dana Orcutt in 1941; the marriage later ended in divorce.