Henry Beston

(1888 - 1968)

Having received his MA from Harvard University in 1911, Henry Beston traveled to France—“the first place in which I encountered and knew and loved the earth”—and served in World War I as an ambulance driver. In 1926 he went to the Cape Cod cottage that he designed and named Fo’castle, realizing that “the longer I stayed, the more eager was I to know this coast and to share its mysterious and elemental life.” Beston died at the age of seventy-nine in 1968; ten years later Fo’castle was swept out to sea in a storm.