John Thorndike graduated from Harvard in 1964, earned an M.A. in English from Columbia in 1966, and spent two years in El Salvador in the Peace Corps. After seven years in Latin America, he returned to the U.S., settled in Ohio and farmed for 10 years. His first book was the novel Anna Delaney’s Child, about a woman whose nine-year-old son dies in a car crash. His second novel was The Potato Baron, about the owner of a large potato farm in northern Maine who must choose between his wife—who wants to live somewhere other than Aroostook County—and the life he loves on his ancestral land. Thorndike’s third book was a memoir, Another Way Home, about raising his son after his wife became schizophrenic. His next book, The Last of His Mind: A Year in The Shadow of Alzheimer’s (Swallow Press, 2009), is a memoir of the year he spent looking after his father, Joseph J. Thorndike—the managing editor of Life from 1946–49 and a founder of American Heritage and Horizon magazines—as he lost his memory, language, self-awareness, and ultimately his life.
John Thorndike
Studios
Wood
John Thorndike worked in the Wood studio.
Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…