Dedicated to Henry Beston's literary classic, The Outermost House, and the spirit of life on the Great Outer Beach of Cape Cod

About The Outermost House

The Outermost House has long been recognized as a classic of American nature writing. This chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach was written in longhand at the kitchen table, in a little room overlooking the North Atlantic and the dunes. Although Henry Beston had originally planned to spend just two weeks in his house on the shore, he was so possessed by the "beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea ... that (he) could not go." As he wrote then, and as many hold to be true nearly 70 years later, "the world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot." In The Outermost House we find all of these wonders of life -- the migrations of shore and sea birds, the ceaseless rhythms of wind and sand and ocean, the pageant of stars in the changing seasons. Beston's words capture the vividness of nature and bring us that much closer to understanding man's true relation to the cosmic picture. In a 1964 ceremony, the Cape Cod house was officially proclaimed a National Literary Landmark. In 1978 a massive winter storm swept it off its foundation and out to sea.

-- From the back cover of The Outermost House, Owl Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York

To order The Outermost House by Henry Beston, or
Journey to Outermost House by Nan Turner Waldron, click here.
To order Henry Beston's Cape Cod by Don Wilding, click here.