“Elliott C. Lincoln deals with two types of verse, descriptive and dialect-narrative, with rather more discrimination than Robert Service, but by no means as much vigor. The descriptive verse is melodious, if often conventional.”
+ Springf’d Republican p11a Jl 11 ’20 180w
“The sociologist often can learn more about America and the American people from this homespun verse without literary distinction than from the smooth rhymes that flow in and around the poetry reviews. Eugene Field was the outstanding master of the homelier craft. A successor of his, perhaps superior in wealth and charm of diction, more direct, more sensitive, is Elliott C. Lincoln.”
+ Survey 44:351 Je 5 ’20 170w
LINCOLN, JOSEPH CROSBY (JOE LINCOLN, pseud.). Portygee. il *$2 (2c) Appleton
20–6287
Portygee is the old Cape Cod term for foreigner expressive of both contempt and suspicion. It is applied with all its hidden meaning to Albert Miguel Carlos Speranza, when he comes to live with his grandparents, old sea captain Zelotes Snow and his wife, after the death of his father, a Spanish opera singer. The latter had eloped with the captain’s only daughter, who had died unforgiven by the old man. Albert, aged seventeen, fresh from a fashionable New York school, has much to live down and to live up to in South Harniss: his inclination to write poetry and his dislike for business, in the first place; and his grandfather’s expectations of him in the second. Little by little and with struggles on both sides, that endear the two leading characters to the reader, both win out. Albert comes to occupy first place in the old man’s heart and is no longer a Portygee, while he gains his own ends, becomes an author, a war hero, and marries the best girl in town.
Booklist 16:313 Je ’20
“The reader of ‘The Portygee’ will find within its pages a somewhat conventional story, but he will find also, as in everything Mr Lincoln has written, a sure understanding of the people of Cape Cod, and an entertaining chronicle of its life and scenes.”