This 1938 first edition copy of Dickon Among the Lenape Indians by M.R. Harrington was purchased at the Maine Bookhouse in Oxford, ME; an exciting find in a bookstore outside of New Jersey. Still used as an educational tool for New Jersey elementary school students, this work has been lauded for its accurate depiction of Lenape Indian life along the Delaware River in the 18th-century. Harrington was actually a museum curator, and really wrote a remarkably sophisticated anthropological study under the guise of a children’s novel. He consulted with three living Lenape sources, and spent significant time researching the food, tools, religion, community structure and the Lenape collection at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Research for the novel was sponsored by the Museum of the American Indian.
“Along with the adventures of Dickon this book presents a picture of the Lenape, or Delaware Indians, as they lived in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before the coming of the whites. The author has tried to make it the most complete and accurate account of this interesting people that has yet appeared, in story form or otherwise.” – Introduction, M.R. Harrington
Figments & Frames 