The journalist and historian Joseph E. Garland, Gloucester's most prolific writer and the author of a now classic biography of fisherman-hero Howard Blackburn, died Tuesday, a month short of his 89th birthday.
Garland had been in declining health since the publication in late 2009 of his 24th book, "Unknown Soldiers," a deeply personal group memoir of his World War II service in an infantry regiment; he worked intermittently on the war book over the course of his life at Black Bess, the Eastern Point cottage where he lived with his muse, partner and wife Helen.
While working out the emotional knots of his post traumatic stress and survivor's guilt over the decades after the war, Garland was a lyrical and cantankerous columnist for the Gloucester Daily Times, and produced a library shelf's worth of Gloucester and North Shore histories starting in 1963 with "Lone Voyager," the Blackburn biography which has remained in print, and was has been translated into multiple languages.
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