Hobblebush Books

WILLIAM TREAT is the quintessential self-made man. His story is the stuff of the original American Dream. There is a whiff of Alger and Lincoln in it and more than a whiff of Franklin and Fitzgerald. As a boy growing up in Winterport, Maine, in the 1920s and 30s he knew both middle-class comfort and Depression-era instability, anxiety, and, I think it is fair to say by current material standards, even poverty. Learning of his success in the world of politics, our judicial system, and business, I was curious to discover how he rose from those roots to his working associations with world leaders and potentates.
—From the Foreword by Robert J. Begiebing

In the Arena is an entertaining account of the extraordinary life and times of a New Hampshire legend. Judge Treat has touched and shaped New Hampshire’s history— in the courts and beyond. . . . It should be required reading for anyone interested in our state’s rich history.
— Honorable John T. Broderick, Jr., Chief Justice, New Hampshire Supreme Court

Merle Drown’s biography of William Treat, written as a companion to the previously published collection of Treat’s letters, memos and memories, aptly serves its purpose of providing context and texture for the remarkable record of growth, achievement and adventure embedded in the documentary record.  Drown tells Treat’s life story with literary grace and scholarly precision, while also evoking the social, economic, institutional and political contexts within which this life unfolded. Through it all William Treat emerges as someone to admire as well as to like, a man who teaches us that high achievement need not be purchased at the price of decency and integrity and is not incompatible with a loving family life and a wry New England sense of humor.
— Dr. Richard Freeland, President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of History, Northeastern University