Reared in a Greenhouse

Beloved as the family storyteller, Dorothy Winthrop Bradford left behind at her death in 1987 diaries, letters, scrapbooks and memorabilia that date back to the Civil War and provide a picture of a way of life long gone - of a period when leisure time was plentiful and cars were few, when her hometown of Hamilton, Massachusetts was open country and Boston a closed society. These materials provide an intimate view of the vanished lifestyle of the upper classes between the two world wars. At the heart of the story is Dorothy Bradford''s own life, and the 82 years she spent in the small town where she was born. It was a life, however, set against the vast canvas of her extened family, whose stories transport the reader back to colonial times, where one of her ancestors was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and far across America and to the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. From the Civil War to the Second World War, from turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico to the glories of the still-unspoiled West, the book is a virtual who''s who of American h istory, filled with cameos by Teddy Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, and many more. Richly illustrated with more than 300 photographs, this intriguing volume looks at a woman who''s life may have seemed, on the surface, narrow and predictable, but in reality, touched upon many of the great currents of American history.