About
Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation. He is the author of a dozen books, including In the Memory House, The Bones of the Earth, The Same Ax, Twice, Chasing Eden, and Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter which The Boston Globe called “a wholly original meditation that’s part observation of the contemporary built environment, part cultural history, part philosophical account, and at times something like a Whitmanian poetic survey.”
He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, the writer Sy Montgomery.
Featured Work
Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers
Seekers are all around us. They are seeking God, seeking freedom, seeking peace. Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers is about that pursuit, about Americans seeking their Promised Land, their utopia out on the horizon -- which by definition, is ever receding before us. In Chasing Eden we meet a gathering of Americans – the Shakers in the twilight of their utopia; the Wampanoags confronting the Pilgrims; the god-besotted landscape painters who taught Americans that in wilderness was Eden; and 40,000 freed slaves granted 40 acres and a mule – only to be swiftly dispossessed. These and other seekers were on the road to find out, all united by their longing to find in America “a revolution of the spirit.”
Other Works
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The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down
2018
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Summer Over Autumn: A Small Book of Small Town Life
2017
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Sheds
2016
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Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter
2013
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Turn & Jump: How time & Place Fell Apart
2010
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Hogwood Steps Out (Barry Moser, illustrator) For children
2008
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Where the Mountain Stands Alone (editor)
2006
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The Bones of the Earth
2004
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The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age
2000
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Skylark: The Life, Lies and Inventions of Harry Atwood
1999
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In the Memory House
1993
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Cosmopolis: Yesterday’s Cities of the Future
1990
Awards and Recognition
- 40 0ver 40 New Hampshire Humanities Council May 2015 The New Hampshire Humanities Council is celebrating their 40th anniversary by honoring 40 New Hampshire-based people who have “demonstrated what it means to create, teach, lead, assist, and encourage human understanding.”
- Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa Franklin Pierce University 2011
- Silver medal, in the science category. Independent Publisher Book Awards 2011
- Gold Medal for Commentary, City and Regional Magazine Competition William Allen White School of Journalism 1985
Press and Media Mentions
- “Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. He and his wife rescued the doomed runt of a litter of pigs and raised it to be the 175-pound Mr. Hogwood, a living symbol of Howard Mansfield’s care for the American, New England, history he writes so well about. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us. This beautiful book is about Time and Rocks.” --Guy Davenport, author of The Death of Picasso
- “As an excavator and guardian of our living past, Howard Mansfield is unmatched. This decent, unpretentious, wonderful writer possesses the sensibility of a poet combined with boundless curiosity and deep, deep knowledge. In its quiet, persistent, honest search for timelessness and truth amidst the clamor of our uncertain times, Turn & Jump takes us to the very soul of America.” –John Heilpern, Vanity Fair
- “Like Thoreau, Mr. Mansfield is a keen observer and, in his neck of New Hampshire, a granitic critic of the rushed life.” -- The Wall Street Journal
- "Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place.... But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield's In the Memory House." --Hungry Mind Review
