Anna Helen Croft McCuen
Anna Helen Croft McCuen was a woman born in North Adams in 1889, where she grew up and then studied at the North Adams Normal School to be a special class teacher, teaching first at Brayton School then teaching 1st grade at Haskins School for 20 years. Her claim to fame, however, is a collaboration she had with renowned author H.P. Lovecraft for the short story “Poetry and the Gods.”
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Born to parents Dr. Nicholas M. and Julia Crofts, Anna began her life in North Adams, Massachusetts in 1889. She lived and grew up in the city and went to the local schools until graduating from Drury High School in 1909. During her early life she found a passion for teaching and the study and creation of literature. She went on to attend the local teachers school, the North Adams Normal School, which today resides on the MCLA campus, where she graduated as a special class teacher in 1919. Quotes and records from her yearbook state she was a sincere and beloved student and classmate. After this she built up her education further with continued classes at Hyannis State College, she then returned to North Adams and taught in the local school systems. From 1922 to 1924 she taught as a special class teacher at the Brayton School before transferring to Haskins School and spending her entire tenure there teaching first grade from 1924 to 1942. During these years she married Joseph McCuen and moved to next door Williamstown where her husband ran a local restaurant as well as a package store before passing away in 1963. She would stay in Williams Town as a retiree and member of various groups such as the St. Patrick’s Church and the National Retired Teachers Association before passing away in 1975 at age 85. Anna was buried in Southview Cemetery in North Adams. This is how most people and the few left behind cousins would remember her, as a teacher and beloved member of the community. She had even been known to travel in her later widowed years moving to “exotic locations” as the newspaper the Berkshire Eagle wrote. However, back in 1920 shortly after graduating from the Normal School, Anna would write in collaboration with the soon to be famous author H.P. Lovecraft in the United Amateur. How this collaboration actually came about is not truly known, with some speculation being they met through a mutual literary friend or Lovecraft simply finding and admiring her work but together they wrote and edited “Poetry and the Gods” a short story about a woman whisked away to meet with the ancient Hellenistic Deities and promised that she would lead an important figure into the future. This short story won an award, but Anna kept very quiet about all her literary works and not very many people knew about her writing in the first place. However, Anna truly did write the short story but included a poem called “Sky Lotus” by Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth without credit, while this was certainly not intentional plagiarism it does need to be stated Her unwillingness to identify herself publicly led to an obscurity which led Lovecroft scholars to speculate on whether this Anna H. Crofts was a real woman to begin with and not a fake name for Lovecraft himself or another author. Unknown during her life, she is now recognized as part of a larger literary legacy.
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Anna Helen Crofts McCuren tombstone.
This photo was taken by Donovan Loucks for Find a Grave.com. It is of Anna Helen Croft’s gravestone in Southview cemetery in North Adams. She is buried alongside her parents and other relatives in section B
Anna Helen Crofts.
Photo taken from the 1919 North Adams Normalogue. | Source: Courtesy of North Adams Historical Society.
Yearbook.
An excerpt from the North Adams Normal School yearbook of 1919, the year Anna graduated. It describes her as someone with “magnetic power” as she appears to have been well regarded from this writing and others about her throughout the book. This may be one of the only images of the woman herself.
Normal School Yearbook.
An example of writing provided in the 1919 Normal School yearbook by Anna. H. Crofts, recounting a banquet held in honor of the school and its graduates at the old Richmond hotel, giving a glimpse into the life these people led over 100 years ago. Some of the lingo especially is fun to read with the way people spoke back then. | Source: Courtesy of the Freel Library
Murdock Hall.
The North Adams Normal School was created in 1894 as a school that taught people how to become teachers and was where Anna herself studied. This later became the State Teachers College of North Adams, then North Adams State College, and finally Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts today. | Source: Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
Anna Helen Croft’s House.
Found still standing on 343 West Main St, North Adams this is the house where Anna Croft spent her life in her adult years before moving to Williamstown with her husband Jospeh. It was built in the early 1900’s and is now owned by an unrelated party.