Samuel Novey—1911–1967

The house on this island, overlooking Muscongus Bay; to the North-East, in the distance, the Georges Islands; to the West, very close, the small island-rock of Manana with its hermit, sheep, and Coast Guard Station—here Sam and Riva Novey and my wife and I spent a few summers together in the fifties. It is a place—rocks, cliffs, woods, sea, sky, seagulls and cormorants, and a small village—we all have loved in our different ways.

Being again on Monhegan, the first time since 1958 and without Sam Novey who was to have visited us here, brings back memories of this man with whom I became friends in the early forties. I visited Baltimore in December 1940, in preparation for my move there, and met Sam on a ward at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital where he then was a resident. During his last year of life, he was back at Sheppard-Pratt, as director of training, a successor to Lewis Hill and Larry Kubie, two men who had been friends of his. Sam was a sombre and, it seemed to me, rather angry young man then, in 1940, too angry or too proud for me to establish contact with him.

I settled in Baltimore in the spring of 1941, and a year or two later we met again. His wife and I by that time were on the staff of the Mental Hygiene Clinic directed by Ralph Truitt and Whit Newell, while Sam had returned to Sheppard on a part-time basis and was establishing himself in private practice, at first as a child psychiatrist, having trained at Fred Allen's clinic in Philadelphia. Soon afterward he began his psycho-analytic training at the Washington-Baltimore Institute.

He was born in North Carolina and came to Baltimore with his family when still a child. Baltimore was very much part of him, and he of Baltimore; but Rocky Mount, North Carolina, remained an important ingredient and a symbol of his early self. Years later he revisited the place of his birth and early childhood and wrote a paper about the need and significance of such a return to one's early environment. It was the dimension o