Kenneth Roberts Books in Order

Roberts’s third dowsing book gathers case histories from Water Unlimited, the company he formed with Henry Gross, arguing that Gross repeatedly located underground water for farms, towns and industry across long distances despite ongoing scientific skepticism.

Set on a barren rock off the Maine coast, this novel reimagines the 1710 wreck of the ship Nottingham Galley, following the stranded crew through hunger, storms and moral choices as they struggle to survive weeks of winter exposure.

In this brief historical study Roberts tells the story of the 1781 Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina, highlighting Daniel Morgan’s tactics and challenging earlier historians’ views of what went wrong for both American and British commanders.

A sequel to Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod, this volume follows a busy year of Water Unlimited, detailing large-scale dowsing projects, mixed successes and failures, and Roberts’s belief that Gross’s abilities point to a little understood human sense.

Here Roberts introduces Henry Gross, a Maine game warden whose use of a forked twig to locate water astonishes the author, and recounts dozens of early well-finding jobs that convinced him dowsing could work over surprising distances.

Part memoir and part craft book, this long narrative traces Roberts’s life from small-town Maine and newspaper offices to bestselling historical novels, focusing on how he researches, revises and deals with editors, critics and the business side of writing.

Roberts and his wife Anna translate and edit the travel journals of French revolutionary figure Moreau de Saint-Méry, capturing his observations of Philadelphia and other parts of the early United States between 1793 and 1798, with introductions that frame his era.

Set during the Haitian Revolution and the early years of the United States, this novel follows young American lawyer Albion Hamlin, whose search for the elusive Lydia Bailey pulls him into slave uprisings, French politics and naval warfare in the Mediterranean.

This anthology gathers essays, travel pieces and chapters from Roberts’s novels, including many items first printed in For Authors Only, giving readers a one-volume sampling of his humor, historical storytelling and sharp opinions about writing and New England.

This sweeping Revolutionary War epic is told from the viewpoint of Oliver Wiswell, a Yale student turned Loyalist who flees mob violence in Massachusetts and spends the war spying, fighting and finally resettling among other displaced Loyalists in the British Empire.

Nonfiction sketches and essays about his home state, this book blends stories of coastal towns, lumber camps, weather, food and local characters, drawing on Roberts’s own experiences to explain why Maine’s landscape and history run so deeply through his fiction.

Roberts assembles and annotates the journals of Benedict Arnold and other participants in the 1775 march through the Maine wilderness to attack Quebec, adding narrative bridges that make the disastrous expedition readable as a single, gripping campaign history.

An expansive novel of the French and Indian War, this book follows aspiring artist Langdon Towne as he joins Major Robert Rogers and his Rangers, chronicling their brutal raid on the Abenaki village of Saint Francis and Rogers’s troubled later years in Michigan and London.

In this short, humorous piece Roberts recounts how English and American doctors insisted that a range of vague ailments must be cured by removing his tonsils, using his own experience to poke fun at medical fashions and overused surgery.

A collection of wry essays about the working life of a writer, covering everything from contracts, agents and publicity to reviewers and taxes, along with a few pieces on New England and travel that show Roberts’s dry sense of humor off the battlefield.

Set during the War of 1812, this sea story follows cautious young captain Dan Marvin and Corunna Dorman after their ship Olive Branch is seized by the British, taking them through convoy duty, prison hulks, Dartmoor Prison and a daring escape toward home.

In the second Arundel novel, Roberts picks up after the failed attack on Quebec and follows Steven Nason and his comrades through retreat, the desperate naval fighting on Lake Champlain and the Saratoga campaign, emphasizing how thin and improvised the American war effort often felt.

This chronicle of Arundel in the War of 1812 centers on Richard Nason, sailing master of the privateer Lively Lady, as he clashes with the British at sea, endures imprisonment and struggles to keep his crew and ship intact amid shifting fortunes.

Opening the Chronicles of Arundel, this novel has Steven Nason tell how life along the Maine coast draws him into Benedict Arnold’s march to Quebec in 1775, blending frontier boyhood, river travel, Abenaki allies and the hazards of a wilderness campaign.

Written during the Florida land boom, this light nonfiction book surveys winter tourists, real-estate schemes and Spanish-style resorts, investigating why so many Americans flock south to loaf in the sun and help reshape Florida’s towns and coasts.

In this brief portrait of President Calvin Coolidge, Roberts sketches the Vermonter’s upbringing, political rise and reserved manner, using him as a kind of distilled symbol of New England habits, virtues and blind spots in the 1920s.

Drawing on his reporting trips in the early 1920s, Roberts examines the rise of fascism in Italy, its violent offshoots in Bavaria and related trends in the United States, arguing from a perspective that now reads as a revealing but troubling period piece.

Based on Roberts’s postwar reporting, this controversial book explains why people from various parts of Europe were emigrating and urges tighter U.S. immigration laws, reflecting the author’s strong nativist views and language that many readers now find openly prejudiced.

This exuberant travel book pokes fun at the wealthy winter crowd in Palm Beach and Miami, the thrifty tin-can tourists of inland Florida and the state’s sales pitches, offering a humorous snapshot of tourism and boosterism in the early 1920s.

Roberts’s first book collects his magazine pieces on a Europe still reeling from the First World War, describing politics, refugees and daily life in countries from Poland to Italy, and laying the groundwork for his later arguments about immigration and American policy.