author
Roger Livingston Scaife
1875–1951
A longtime publishing man with a sharp eye for social detail, he wrote with warmth about both high society and the everyday pleasures of Cape Cod. His work offers an appealing glimpse of early 20th-century New England life.
1 Audiobook
Cape Coddities
by Roger Livingston Scaife
About the author
Born in Boston in 1875, Roger Livingston Scaife studied at Harvard, graduating in 1897. He built much of his career in publishing, beginning at Houghton Mifflin in 1898, where he worked in publicity and later rose to senior roles. Sources from publishing and archival collections also note that he later became vice-president and a director of Little, Brown, and that he had connections with Harvard University Press.
As a writer, Scaife is best known for Cape Coddities (1920), a lively, affectionate portrait of Cape Cod and its local customs. He also wrote The Confessions of a Débutante (1913), showing a very different side of his interests: the rituals and manners of society life. That mix of regional observation and social comedy gives his work a distinct period charm.
Scaife died in 1951. Though he is not widely known today, his books still stand out for their light touch, their sense of place, and the way they preserve a world of seaside routines, family life, and old-fashioned social expectations.