As a chronicler and defender of his region - no less a neighbor than John Updike would call him “the definitive historian of the North Shore’’ - Mr. Garland wrote more than a dozen books about Gloucester and Cape Ann, beginning with the 1963 adventure classic “Lone Voyager,’’ a biography of Howard Blackburn, known as the “Fingerless Navigator.’’
After a long life residing on the ocean and writing about it, Joseph E. Garland died Aug. 30 in his Gloucester Harbor home, following a recent stroke. He was 88.
As the Gloucester Schooner Festival, which Mr. Garland helped establish, prepared for its 27th annual celebration this weekend, his seafaring friends paid their respects.
“All the sailors who knew him formed a ring on the water,’’ said Mr. Garland’s wife, Helen Bryan Garland. “It was the most touching thing. They all had their flags at half mast. I can’t imagine Joe ever expected such incessant tributes.’’
With Helen’s encouragement, Mr. Garland completed his most expansive book, “Unknown Soldiers,’’ in 2008. The book, decades in the making, originated with Mr. Garland’s own war diary, recovered by a fellow soldier after the future author was wounded in battle.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Garland set out across the country to track down his old Army buddies, equipped with a tape recorder and a bottle of bourbon.
But when he sat down to write the book, Mr. Garland found himself stricken with a colossal case of writer’s block.
It would be decades before Helen, his second wife - a wartime pen pal with whom he later reconnected - realized that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
She became convinced of it after reading Dr. Jonathan Shay’s landmark 1994 book about combat trauma, “Achilles in Vietnam.’’
Talking with Shay about his war experience enabled Mr. Garland “to rear back and whack through’’ his inability to get started on the book, he told The Boston Globe in 2008.
A painstakingly detailed document of the ordeals of his Army brethren, the book is also the author’s anguished cry about the futility of war.
