Flappers & Fiction

James Russell Lowell grew up in a Cambridge that felt less like a city and more like a sleepy village, where the local barber kept a museum of curiosities and the deacon sold apples that were neither sweet nor sour. At his family estate, Elmwood, the young student preferred the company of robins and Spenser’s “golden days” to his mathematics lessons. Though he dutifully attempted a career in law, the pull of the library was too strong. This is a portrait of the boy who eventually traded his legal briefs for a life of letters.