When I got up from the Keelers’ breakfast table there was something choking me besides the herrin’ and golden seal, and it was not homesickness, either.

Nineteen-year-old Sarah, fresh out of school and not knowing what to do with her life, chooses to journey to a land she knows to be a remote, poverty-stricken place containing no society, no church, no library, not even a little country store. That place was the 19th-century village of Kedarville on Cape Cod where she was to be the local schoolteacher. Cape Cod Folks is a thinly disguised memoir of her year teaching in the rural Cape and of her encounters with the Keeler Family, Becky Weir, and especially her romance with the handsome and talented Lute Cradlebow.

The memoir was so thinly disguised that McLean included the original names of all of the Cape Cod folk in the story. A year after its publication they sued McLean and her publisher for libel, pointing out that, despite what McLean had written, the main character had not been the gawky lover of Sarah Pratt McLean and no one in the village died during her stay. Despite the controversy, the novel was a success that inspired both a stage play and a Hollywood film. It provides an unforgettable picture of life on Cape Cod before the arrival of the twentieth century.

Sarah Pratt McLean (1856-1935) taught at the Cedarville School in Plymouth for a year in the late 1870s. She continued writing stories full of local color for the next thirty-two years, producing fourteen books set in New England and the American West.