Elizabeth Mann

Elizabeth Foster (Mann) was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1905 to Elizabeth Dickson and well-known writer/playwright Maximilian Foster. She attended Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, the Art Students League in New York, and the Columbia School of Journalism, New York. In 1929 she married Lloyd Onderdonk Vernon Mann, living first with him in Cold Spring Harbor and later in Oyster Bay, New York. Their two daughters were Mariana Vernon and Nancy Lloyd.

Foster was a prolific freelance writer, composing short stories and poems for publications such as Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Home & Garden, and Trout and Stream. She also became editor of the North Shore Almanac, a supplement to a Long Island newspaper chain. After her divorce in 1939 she began her first novel, Singing Beach (1941), set on an island off the coast of Maine. In 1942 her second novel, The Days Between, was published and bought by Warner Brothers for $25,000. Foster published her first children's novel, Gigi, The Story of a Merry-Go-Round Horse in 1943, followed by Dirigo Point, with a background of Franklin County in Maine.

A second Gigi novel, Gigi in America, was published in 1945, and is set in another Maine location, Old Orchard Beach. The Islanders, her most important Maine-centered novel, was published in 1946 and became a bestseller. It is a family saga focused on her maternal grandfather, Frederick Stoever Dickson, and the home he built on Rangeley Lake. Children of the Mist, published in 1960, is based on an actual eighteenth century English scandal. Elizabeth Foster died on February 9, 1963, and is buried at the family plot in Evergreen Cemetery, Rangeley, Maine.