A town, a house, and twenty years: who married, who drank, who prospered, who was found out-the ledger of a New England community read across a generation. Arthur left school at thirteen, half-blind and apprenticed to a watchmaker, and became one of the most widely read Americans of his century, chiefly with Ten Nights in a Bar Room. Here the moral is the structure: everything comes due. Fifty-seven plates of houses, weddings, and streets, from Munch to Homer, give the town's twenty-year reckoning a face.
