Long Island has long been captured, transfigured, romanticized and immortalized in fiction. From inner-island suburbia to beachside glamour, Manhattan’s eastern counterpart has provided an endless supply of inspiration to American writers. Perhaps the most famous work —F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — set the American imagination alight with a certain vision of Long Island: an idyllic, moneyed land where the wealthy live in gilded mansions, gallivanting about green lawns.

 While other novels, such as Richard Yates’ Cold Spring Harbor, returned to Fitzgerald’s North Shore, contemporary authors and literary culture at large tend to be primarily fascinated with the Hamptons. Take Colson Whitehead’s 2009 hit, Sag Harbor, which looked at class divides and racism in the small summer community, or the more recent success of Emma Cline’s The Guest. 

Despite the ever-growing pile of books set on Long Island, fewer feature the North Fork as their central setting. But a small group of authors have focused on the area’s small towns, natural beauty and rich history, writing books where the North Fork is not mere background, but the main character. 

Orient

Christopher Bollen, who set his 2015 mystery novel Orient in — well — Orient, felt as if he had stumbled upon the North Fork like a “prize.” Bollen was an arts writer living in Manhattan and, like many fortunate twenty-somethings, found himself joining friends out east for summer weekends in the 2000s. He spoke of his friends and those summers — this community of artists from Manhattan, renting in picturesque Orient — with a twinge of nostalgia. 

The North Fork captivated Bollen immediately. 

“It felt like it had its own culture and its own life and its own distinct place that was not ruled by the money of New York,” he said. “I was like, ‘I need to write about this before anyone else does, ’cause it’s so good.’”

Of course, he joked, he went and ruined it by writing about it, as all writers do. 

Orient is fueled by the narrative trope of murder in a small town: the body of a local caretaker washes ashore on the beach. Then, a monstrous animal corpse is discovered. An outsider and insider hunt down the killer. 

Bollen fell in love with Orient’s isolation, which felt at odds with its geographic proximity to the city. It was this isolation — a seaside village, only reachable by a narrow causeway — that made it the perfect setting for a murder mystery. 

“It felt very much like those kind of Agatha Christie environments where the snow comes and shuts down all connections to the outer world.” 

Red Like Wine: The North Fork Harbor Vineyard Murders

Joseph Finora (a North Fork Sun contributor) similarly felt the North Fork’s pull as an ideal setting for a crime novel. His book, Red Like Wine: The North Fork Harbor Vineyard Murders, published in 2013, blends murder and romance. Finora said his book has “something for everyone.” 

“There’s so many different categories of crime writing,” he said. “I just let it take its own shape.”

Finora has lived out here for 30 years, giving him the local know-how to write a book engaging intimately with a major part of the local culture and economy: the wine industry. Part of his motivation for writing, in fact, was to promote the North Fork at large. Jamesport Vineyard owner, Ron Goerler Jr., lent him the technical expertise to write about the inner workings of a wine business. 

While vineyards, sprawling farmland, and small, whispering communities make a rich setting for murder mysteries, Finora also intended to capture the bucolic splendor of his home. 

“I wanted people to know how naturally beautiful the North Fork is, with the sparkling Peconic Bay. Writing about it came naturally. I would look out my window or walk around town, and those kinds of things would just come pouring in,” he said. 

The Irish Goodbye

This coastal, pastoral landscape also appealed to writer Heather Aimee O’Neill, whose debut book, The Irish Goodbye, is set in the fictional Port Haven, a stand-in for the real-life Greenport. The novel unfolds over the course of one Thanksgiving weekend, when the homecoming of three adult sisters to their beloved seaside home shakes loose tragedy and secrets from the past. 

O’Neill, a Brooklyn resident who grew up in Huntington in a house on the water, said that having spent her youth on the coastline, she feels it “just gets in your bones.” 

At the emotional core of the story is a fatal childhood boating accident on the bay that haunts the three sisters. “I like the tension between what’s beautiful can also be dangerous,” she said. 

“One of the ways I’ve always felt about the landscape there is that it has a kind of haunting feel to it. There’s almost like a little bit of melancholy to it, but in the most beautiful way, almost like Ireland.” 

The invented Port Haven is at once everywhere on Long Island and nowhere. Borrowing from the naming conventions of towns like “Port Jefferson” and “Port Washington,” O’Neill wanted to capture the qualities of waterfront communities across Long Island. She was wary of naming a real-life town, though she loved the North Fork, and found it much more compelling of a setting for her novel than the Hamptons. 

“When you center your story in a very specific town, you have to get it right. You cannot get it wrong. I didn’t have that kind of level of insight into Greenport, so it just felt too overwhelming.” 

Ensuring your fiction accurately reflects its adopted setting is a duty all authors writing about real places must grapple with. For those working in historical fiction, this charge is even greater. How does one stay true to the past, without having complete access to it?

The Lady Lighthouse Keeper  

Local author Mary Korpi found herself tasked with imagining the inner life of someone who lived long ago when she stumbled upon the protagonist of her historical novel, The Lady Lighthouse Keeper, while working as a docent at Horton Point Lighthouse in Southold. The book is a fictionalized account of Stella Prince, a late-19th-century lighthouse keeper at Horton Point. Korpi’s discovery of a singular paragraph record of Prince set her curiosity aflame. 

How was that all that remained of her? Why was she not in any of the books about female lighthouse keepers? Unlike many women of her era, Prince never kept a journal. She never wrote anything personal in the keeper’s logbook — only the weather, Korpi said — which made accessing her character more difficult, but the process all the more rewarding. 

Korpi’s curiosity led her deep into the North Fork’s local historical archives. 

“I got into origin sources from the local historians, going to the Suffolk Historical Museum and Southold Historical. A researcher at Southold Library, Danny McCarthy, who has since passed away, was wonderful in finding all kinds of stuff. Any time the Prince family name came up in history, he sent me a clip about it.”

Eventually, she accumulated a trove of material and thought, “‘I’m going to have to write a book. This is too much stuff to fit on a trifold.’”

The pandemic lockdown gave Korpi the time and space to pen a complete draft. Two years later, her book was ready to hit the shelves, and she took a copy to each of the local libraries and bookstores, expressing her willingness to share her novel and speak about Prince. The North Fork responded enthusiastically to her work. 

“More than any place else that I’ve ever lived, we really nurture and cherish our history here,” Korpi said. 

The North Fork is, of course, a writer’s playscape. The natural scenery, much of which remains farmland, the historical hamlets and the coastal soul are each singularly attractive elements. Combined, they make the North Fork fertile ground for someone with a writer’s mind. In a place like ours, the imagination easily wanders, spinning stories across genres.