"If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the «natives» were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, The novel «Ethan Frome» by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. It was first published in 1911. «Ethan Frome» is framed by the literary device of an extended flashback.
