John Hay, 95, of Bremen, died Feb. 26.
He was born on Aug. 31, 1915, in Ipswich, Mass. Raised in New York, N.Y., he graduated from St. Paul’s School in 1934 and Harvard College in 1938. His boyhood summers were spent in Newbury, N.H., where he explored the woods and mountains around Lake Sunapee and cruised the lake in a 14-foot houseboat. These summers began a lifelong involvement with writing and the natural world.
After college, he worked as Washington correspondent for the “Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier” until enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1940. He married Kristi Putnam in 1942; after the war, they settled in Brewster, Mass. He served on the Brewster Conservation Commission and as president of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. He taught nature writing at Dartmouth College for 15 years. His literary career began with the publication of “A Private History” (1947), a collection of poetry, and “The Run” (1959), now a classic work of nature writing.
After “The Run”, Hay would go on to write 12 more books, to co-author another, and to publish two anthologies. The title of his eighth book, “In Defense of Nature” (1969) could apply to everything he wrote. He consistently maintained that the depletion of the natural world was a depletion of the human imagination. His prose, for all its precision of detail, had a strongly visionary quality: he never ceased to be a poet. “The Great Beach” (1963) won the John Burroughs Medal. His reputation spread slowly and quietly. By the end of his life, he had become an exemplar and an inspiration to a rising generation of American nature writers.
He is survived by his children, Susan Burroughs of Bowdoinham, Katherine Hay of Northampton, Mass. and Charles Hay of Essex, Mass.; grandchildren, Frances Coles, Elizabeth and Hannah Burroughs, Holly and Kristi Spicer, and John and Cole Hay; and three great-grandchildren.
Memorial donations may be sent to Brewster Conservation Trust, P.O. Box 268, Brewster, MA 02631 or Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, 54 Portsmouth St., Concord, NH 03301.
