Robert Peter Tristram Coffin (1892-1955) was born in Brunswick on March 18, 1892 and grew up in Harpswell on Great Island on his father’s salt water farm. Coffin graduated from Bowdoin College in 1915 at the top of his class, having won several prizes for his excellent writing, including the Hawthorne Prize for short stories twice. Awarded the Henry W. Longfellow fellowship, he spent a year at Princeton then went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. His studies were interrupted by a year in the armed services during World War I. In 1924 he published his volume of poems, Christchurch, the first of forty books. By 1936 he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Strange Holiness. Other awards include Honorary Life Member, National Arts Club, 1931; Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Harvard, 1932; Gold Medal, National Honor Poet, 1935; and elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1946. R. P. T. Coffin lectured at the University of Indiana and at the University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the English Department at Wells College in Aurora, New York. Coffin returned to Bowdoin to teach (1934-1955), and was honored there on July 9, 1948.

Mainstays of Maine is a collection of essays he wrote about Maine cooking, and about his family as he was growing up in Brunswick. In his words, This is not a cook-book, though there are a lot of good Maine dishes in it.