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Arts & Entertainment

The Novels That Live in Fairfield County

Towns such as Westport and Greenwich have frequently served as a backdrop in popular novels.

Everyone knows Fairfield County has been home to famous writers. The list runs the gamut from Mark Twain (Redding) to (Weston), Howard Fast (Greenwich and Redding) to Keith Richards (the and, oh yeah, Rolling Stone, who lives in Weston).

But how many novelists have set their novels in Fairfield County? And dared to name their towns?

A quick survey by Patch turned up quite a few (with helpful jump-starts by ’s Marta Campbell and ’s Jennifer Dayton). Here’s the beginning of a list (help us round it out in the comments section below!):

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  • The prolific left-leaning Howard Fast, who was blacklisted in the fifties, set his last novel with social and political themes in Greenwich, which was his last home, in 2000. He called it Greenwich so there would be no mistaking the context.
  • Sloan Wilson’s 1955 best-seller, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, is set in Southport. (It became a popular film a year later, starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones.) It was a ground-breaking look at conformity in corporate suites.
  • Ira Levin set The Stepford Wives in fictional Stepford, Connecticut, in 1972, but he later revealed he based the town of Stepford on Wilton, where he had lived in the 1960s. The satirical thriller novel was adapted in two movies, starring successively Katharine Ross and Nicole Kidman. The term “Stepford wife” has entered the cultural lexicon as a reference to the transformation of a go-getter, independent-minded woman to a submissive and docile wife, swallowed up by suburban sterility.
  • The Winthrop Woman is Anya Seton’s 1958 historical novel about Elizabeth Fones, daughter-in-law of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The plot takes its characters to colonial New England locations, including Greenwich.
  • Max Shulman’s 1958 Rally Round the Flag, Boys! is set in fictional Putnam’s Landing, Connecticut, a community with real spirit and interesting people – writers, artists, actors, ad men, TV executives “and other such animated types"– that comes off suspiciously like Westport, which is where Shulman lived in the 1950s when he wrote the book about Cold War era paranoia. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward starred in the film adaptation.
  • Revolutionary Road is the acclaimed first novel of Richard Yates set in a fictional Fairfield County suburb in 1955 and published in 1961. When Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio starred in the film version in 2008, some scenes were shot in Darien. The plot follows a young couple mired in a suburban rut, longing to cut loose.
  • Laura J. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement is a stinging 1947 look at anti-Semitism in an affluent New York suburb. Hobson named the name — Darien — and has not been forgiven by town fathers in the intervening 64 years. What was worse, a film version starring Gregory Peck was nominated for an Oscar.
  • New York Times best-selling author Peter Straub moved to Westport after living in Dublin and London and that’s where he set his 1982 novel Floating Dragon, a thriller, set in the fictional, but very Westport-like, Hampstead.
  • Reckless is the 2010 murder-mystery by Andrew Gross that’s set in Greenwich and made it to the New York Times Bestsellers list. It’s a financial world whodunit that takes off with the murder of a trader at a major brokerage and the murder's  immediate effect on world financial markets.
  • Cathleen Schine, who grew up in Westport, has set two novels in the town she knows best: The Love Letter (2007) and Three Weissmans of Westport (2010).
  • Most recently, Tom Seligson, a TV producer from Westport, set his 2011 thriller, King of Hearts, about the true-life spectacular bank heist in Iraq in 2003, in, of all places, Westport, Connecticut.
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