Henry Beston was born in 1888 in Quincy, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, to Irish-American doctor Joseph Sheahan and Marie Louise (Maurice) Beston (henrybeston.com). Beston grew, went to school and returned to Harvard, the school where he received his M.A., to work in the English department as an assistant. After this, he served in the armed forces during the First World War. It was here that his life would change and he would see the things that set him on his path to reconstruct himself in Cape Cod, a place he thought of as beautiful and enriching from its environment. “The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year” (Beston). From the passage above, it seemed clear what Beston thought after his war experiences. It seemed clear what he thought of the world insofar as we, humanity, had marked it; in the same way that the terrible things he and men …show more content…
The book is filled with what some call self-discovery, where ego does not get in the way of what Beston wishes to say, and that it restores life to him (Sherman). Later in life, Beston would feel that civilization suffered from an absence of a relationship with the Earth, an alienation from nature, and that society had no future if that would continue (Nelson). For this reason The Outermost House is an important work because it discusses everything that needs to be discussed about how one looks at the natural world and about how, like it did for Beston, can heal the wounds suffered mentally from traumatic