The Seeking

Novelist Will Thomas had been a logger in Maine, a crew member on a fishing boat in Alaska, a prizefighter on the West Coast, a scriptwriter in Los Angeles, and a journalist in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. In 1946 he, his wife, and three children abandoned a plan to move to Haiti to escape racial prejudice in the United States. Instead, they made the improbable decision to purchase a home in tiny Westford, Vermont, twenty miles northeast of Burlington. At the time, the Thomases were the o…