A Tale of Two Cities: Warner and Marquand in Newburyport

Abstract

Once upon a time, an ethnographer and a novelist happened to seek out the same city, walk the same streets, and encounter the same people. Each wrote a book depicting life as he saw it. What would the two portraits look like? What would each author succeed in capturing, from that "once upon a time"? More than half a century ago, ethnographer Lloyd Warner and novelist John Marquand frequented Yankee City, alias Clyde, alias Yankee Persepolis, alias Newburyport, Massachusetts. In Marquand's novel, protagonist banker and ethnographer meet. This article will explore the outcome of that chance meeting of fiction and social science.With writing the anthropologist is able to do more than count the fanegas of maize traded at the market. With writing, the anthropologist can objectify the conversations of the people about him so that they may speak to distant audiences about their accomplishments, about their worries, about their dreams. He can become their mythteller.