There are certain places in America that mean something, and Massachusetts could still be said to be one of them.

It is a place where the shadows of abandoned textile mills loom over the sidewalks of sleepy college towns, where the weeds of urban neglect creep up through cobblestones as old as the Commonwealth, and where a young writer can stumble drunk out his back door into the darkness of a New England summer night and find himself standing among the ghosts of Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James.

In the streets of Haverhill, Massachusetts, the writer Andre Dubus (1936–1999) did precisely that, spending the better part of thirty years writing and teaching in that north-of-Boston town.

In the editor’s note to a new three-volume collection of Dubus’s work (the third of which is forthcoming), the author Joshua Bodwell warns us that “there is perhaps no greater double-edged compliment in literature than the phrase ‘writer’s writer.’” The expression calls to mind authors of great skill who failed somehow to find an audience larger than a cultivated circle of writerly friends.

There is a sense of discovery in reading Dubus for the first time.

There is, for writers and non-writers alike, a sense of discovery in reading Dubus for the first time. For a native New Englander like myself, coming across such gems as “An Afternoon with the Old Man” and “The Winter Father” gave me nostalgia for a childhood spent shivering in backseats while