When my mother, the writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, was left a widow following my stepfather Robert Lowell’s death, from a heart attack in the back of a New York taxicab, she decided to move us from our house in Ireland to the States. She had spent many summers in the Hamptons, moving between the exclusive beach villages of Southampton, East Hampton, and Bridgehampton, but it was a visit to a friend’s boat in Sag Harbor that persuaded her to buy a house there.
At the time, Sag Harbor was considered very much the un-Hampton, a poor relation to its swankier neighbors. However, Sag also had a long history of being a home to writers, including John Steinbeck, E. L. Doctorow, Betty Friedan, and Thomas Harris. It was also rumored that Melville had written part of Moby Dick in the village. Originally the main seaport of entry into the U.S., Sag had become a whaling town with a large, affluent Black population.
