Live Free or Die

AN ASSISTANT Professor of English at Dartmouth, Ernest Hebert is best known nationally for his acclaimed series of novels about the fictional town of Darby, New Hampshire. The fifth and last Darby book, which follows the miscommunication and blocked desires of two lonely polar opposites from opposite sides of the tracks, LiveFree is in many ways his best work of New England sociology. For Hebert is more than a novelist; he is a smalltown anthropologist who seeks out what he calls the "tree-infested, rockstrewn hills and the kind of people who hunkered down among them."