Kenneth Lewis Roberts – Captain, United States Army Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author

Kenneth L. Roberts was born in Maine on 8 December 1885.  He served in World War I as a Military Intelligence Officer.

He was an author and received the Pulitzer Prize 1957).  He wrote “Arundel”, “Northwest Passage”, “Rabble in Arms”, “The Lively Lady”, “Battle of the Cowpens” and “Boon Island.”


Roberts, who was born in Kennebunk’s Storer Mansion and in 1938 built a home called Rocky Pastures in Kennebunkport, was a correspondent for the “Saturday Evening Post” until he quit to write his many historical novels and his books of essays and other non-fiction, most set in New England: Why Europe Leaves Home (1922), The Collector’s Whatnot (1923; written by Roberts and Booth Tarkington using nom de plumes of Cornelius O. Van Loot, Milton Kilgallen, and Murgatroyd
Elphinstone), Antiquamania (1928; written by Roberts and illus. by Booth Tarkington), Arundel (1930; about Arnold’s expedition), Lively Lady (1931; War of 1812; features son of the hero of Arundel), Rabble in Arms (1933), Captain
Caution: A Chronicle of Arundel (1934), For Authors Only, and Other Gloomy Essays (1945), Northwest Passage (1936), March to Quebec (1938; journals of the members of Arnold’s expeditions), Trending into Maine (1938/1944; essays on Maine legends, history, seafaring, food), Oliver Wiswell (1940), The Kenneth Roberts Reader (1945; excerpts and essays), Lydia Bailey (1947), Don’t Say That About Maine! (1948), I Wanted to Write (1949), Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod (1951; Maine game warden whose gift of water dousing led to fresh water in Bermuda), The Seventh Sense (1953), Boon Island (1955; about actual shipwreck in early Maine history), Water Unlimited (1957), The Battle of Cowpens: The Great Morale Builder (1957; his last novel).

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