Melville House Books

Noel Perrin, the scholar and essayist who wrote articles for the New Yorker and books about the pleasures of the rural life, died last week at his home in Thetford Center, Vermont. Perrin, suffered from the degenerative neurological disorder Shy-Drager syndrome, was 77. As a New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox notes, Perrin “was best known for his collections of autobiographical essays about the pleasures and occasional perils of life on a Vermont farm, beginning, in 1978, with First Person Rural. As the series progressed, his work became the benchmark against which other aspirants to the rural-writing genre were measured.” But Perrin, a long-time professor at Dartmouth, also wrote about other matters—such as “the pleasures of reading itself.” As Fox observes, Perrin’s 1988 book A Reader’s Delight “was a collection of rhapsodic essays about his favorite books, all obscure, most long out of print. Several of the titles were reissued as a result.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.