Sag Harbor - a Home for Writers

Is it something in the water? In the air?

Whatever it is, distinguished writers have been flocking to the South Fork for a very long time. James Fenimore Cooper was the first to live here in Sag Harbor in 1818, when he got involved in the whaling business. Some say a local sea captain was the inspiration for Natty Bumppo, Cooper’s hero in The Leatherstocking Tales.

There were novelists aplenty after that.

James Jones (From Here to Eternity) lived in Sagaponack, followed by famed science fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, John Knowles (A Separate Peace), and even Manhattan sophisticate Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s).  E.L Doctorow liked Sag Harbor in the summers and lived near feminist author and revolutionary, Betty Friedan, while Joseph Heller preferred Amagansett. Mario Puzo of The Godfather fame lived in Southampton, Carl Bernstein in Bridgehampton, John Irving in Sagaponack, and back in Sag Harbor, Thomas Harris was cranking out the terrifying Silence of the Lambs.

But what was surprising to me was how many of my fellow playwrights made a home here.

It seems that theater giant, Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virigina Wolf; Who Is Sylvia?, etc), ever the trailblazer, led the way when he bought a home on three acres in Montauk. Guess he needed some room for those three Pulitzer Prizes and multiple Tony statuettes.

Playwright Lanford Wilson followed, becoming a full-time Sag Harbor resident in 1998.  Spalding Gray, the famous “Downtown” theater monologist, lived here. As did Terence McNally (five Tony Awards). Funnyman Mel Brooks (two Tony Awards), was nearby in Water Mill, cracking jokes. But my favorite Sag Harbor writer was John Steinbeck, Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Steinbeck only wrote one play, of course, but it was a doozy – Of Mice and Men. It was constructed as a kind of hybrid; he called it a “novel-play.” Broadway critics called it a hit, and it continues to be performed around the world.

Unlike the other writers I mentioned, you can actually visit Steinbeck’s home, a beautiful cottage on Bluff Point with water on three sides. He didn’t write in the house. He had built a tiny writer’s retreat on the very edge of the property, a small wooden pergola with a steep sided shingled roof. Sitting at his desk, Steinbeck was surrounded by windows, giving him an almost 360-degree view of the water through the trees on his property. Perfect.

I wrote my newest play, Bob & Jean, A Love Story, in my airy office in the second story of my house here in Sag Harbor. I can’t see the water, but my view is full of trees, tall red oaks, various pines, and even some cherry trees. I never grow weary of it. But when I need broad vistas and salt spray, I usually walk Long Beach. Sometimes, during the dark days of COVID, I would collect scallop shells and think about my father, walking the Pacific beaches of Vanuatu, collecting seashells for my mother, Jean.

There is something profoundly spiritual about this area, this combination of woods and water, salt and fresh and sometimes brackish. Maybe that’s what has drawn writers to Sag for over 100 years now. We writers are a restless lot by nature, but Sag’s magical combination of elements somehow feels like home. It certainly does for me.

Robert Schenkkan is a Pulitzer and Tony Award winning writer.