event

As part of its celebration of 250 years of American independence, the Cornwall Library presents artist, author, and Yale professor Adam Van Doren speaking about his highly acclaimed book In the Founders’ Footsteps: Landmarks of the American Revolution. It contains Van Doren’s essays about and paintings of 32 historic sites. Historian Nathaniel Philbrick wrote the preface.

“Van Doren has a knack for revealing relics of the Revolution as strangely, beautifully alive.”—Wall Street Journal

In the Founders’ Footsteps is a tour through the original thirteen colonies in search of historical sites and their stories in America’s founding. Obscure, well-known, off-the-beaten path, and on busy city streets, here are taverns, meeting houses, battlefields, forts, monuments, and homes which all combine to define our country—the places where daring people forged a revolution.

There is always something new to be found in America’s past that also brings greater clarity to our present and the future we choose to make as a nation. Van Doren traveled from Maine to Georgia in that spirit. There are thirty-seven landmarks included, with fifteen additional locations noted in brief. From the Bunker Hill monument in Massachusetts to the Camden Battlefield Site in South Carolina, this is a tour of an American cultural landscape with a curious, perceptive, and insightful guide.

The reader steps inside cabins at Valley Forge where nearly two thousand soldiers perished during a cruel winter, meets the chef at Philadelphia’s City Tavern where the menu is based on 18th century fare, seeks out the Swamp Fox in Georgia, visits the homes of Alexander Hamilton, John and Abigail Adams, the Joseph Webb House on the Connecticut River where French general Rochambeau made plans with Washington, and much more. An unvarnished view, we also see Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York, where Blacks were once held as slaves to work in the Hudson River Valley.

For armchair travelers and anyone fascinated by Americana, Van Doren has created an unforgettable journey through history. We see the Founders—both their stunning achievements and chilling moral failures—where they lived, fought, and agreed on a common purpose, to create a nation whose future—and its legacy—is continually evolving.

Adam Van Doren received a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University and has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. He teaches at Yale University and has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, among other institutions. His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Wadsworth Atheneum, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Adam’s family make their home in New York City and Cornwall, CT.

Registration is required.

Also, Attendees may wish to purchase tickets to the Cornwall Historical Society’s summer party and auction at 7 Pine Street beginning at 5:30 pm. Register at https://cornwallhistoricalsociety.org/events/

Saturdays – August 8, 15, and 22 (10 am to 11:30 am)

Try the art medium of pastels and experiment with vibrant colors and quick painting and drawing time to paint flowers and landscapes.

Beginner class presentation of different types of pastels and supplies, and techniques to achieve a variety of effects for flowers and landscapes.

Supplies will be available at the class if you do not already have them.

Fee: $75 includes 3 weekly Saturday sessions – payable to instructor at first class.

Registration is required.

A special evening with Francine Prose, author of Five Weeks in the Country, which brilliantly imagines a true encounter between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen in a story of strange friendship.  Prose will be in conversation with novelist and biographer Roxana Robinson.

Five Weeks in the Country, a work of imaginative fiction inspired by actual events, is Francine Prose at her dazzling best.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Reading Like a Writer and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, comes an utterly original novel inspired by the strange friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen and set during the summer when Dickens’s family life exploded.

In the summer of 1857, when British newspapers warned of an approaching comet about to destroy the earth, an unusual-looking stranger arrived at Charles Dickens’s home, Gad’s Hill, in the countryside outside London. Dickens had met Hans Christian Andersen at a dinner party a decade before and, in a moment of desperation, had invited him to visit.

The visit did not go well. The eccentric Danish author of classic fairy tales, who barely spoke English, outstayed his welcome by many weeks and alienated the Dickens household, which included nine children. Even the oblivious, obsessively self-conscious Andersen sensed the increasing tension between Dickens and his unhappy wife, Catherine, but was slow to understand—or to believe—that Dickens had fallen in love with a young actress appearing in his new play.

For Andersen, those five weeks were a series of social mistakes and embarrassments, but ultimately a lesson in how life’s most humbling experiences can be transformed into art.

Prose is a distinguished, award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic, the author of twenty novels and much nonfiction. A review of her recent memoir 1974 justly calls Prose “one of the great overachievers of her era.” She is a visiting professor at Bard College, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and formerly president of PEN American Center. She has received Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NYPL Cullman Center. Her novel Blue Angel (2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2010, she received the Washington University International Humanities Medal. She has even had a novel adapted as a Broadway musical.

Books will be available for sale and signing. Registration is required.

Saturdays – August 8, 15, and 22 (10 am to 11:30 am)

Try the art medium of pastels and experiment with vibrant colors and quick painting and drawing time to paint flowers and landscapes.

Beginner class presentation of different types of pastels and supplies, and techniques to achieve a variety of effects for flowers and landscapes.

Supplies will be available at the class if you do not already have them.

Fee: $75 includes 3 weekly Saturday sessions – payable to instructor at first class.

Registration is required.

Saturdays – August 8, 15, and 22 (10 am to 11:30 am)

Try the art medium of pastels and experiment with vibrant colors and quick painting and drawing time to paint flowers and landscapes.

Beginner class presentation of different types of pastels and supplies, and techniques to achieve a variety of effects for flowers and landscapes.

Supplies will be available at the class if you do not already have them.

Fee: $75 includes 3 weekly Saturday sessions – payable to instructor at first class.

Registration is required.

This event will be held at the Cornwall Town Hall, 24 Pine Street, Cornwall.

Kurt B. Andersen is an American writer, the author of novels and histories, four of them New York Times bestsellers. He is also a screenwriter and regularly contributes to the Times and the Atlantic. He was a co-founder of Spy magazine and host of the weekly Peabody Award-winning public radio program Studio 360.

The Breakup is his fifth novel. It’s 2045 and Natalie and Asher’s 23-year marriage has long-standing fault lines over what they think of their fellow Americans and of AI-saturated modern life. In 2045, having survived the two-year civil war together, they’re now living separately for the first time since they met. Millennial Asher is in San Francisco with their daughter; Gen-Z Natalie has retreated to her home state of Tennessee in the borderlands of the US and new Free American Republic. The couple’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling — confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate. Brought back together for a sprawling college tour with their 17-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new carved-up America, all while dealing with the flux — and resilience — in their own family. With the hovering question: What differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?

Ranging from tragic to comic to suspenseful, and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping tale of the personal and sociopolitical intersecting –– bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

Roxana Robinson will serve as Interlocutor. She is the author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, three as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR.

Books will be available for sale and signing. Registration is required.