Filmed In Delaware
In Delaware, Centerville was the spooky setting of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and the not spooky at all backdrop for the Meg Ryan vehicle Addicted to Love in 1997.
TV & Books, Too
Baltimoreans remain proud of their town's starring role in Homicide: Life on the Streets. HBO's The Wire, also by David Simon, was filmed here, as well.
The good-natured folks of Delaware haven't gotten their own television show (and thank goodness, not even one about urban violence), but the Delaware-based Punkin' Chunkin' has given the state its 15 minutes of fame. It's been featured on ESPN and the Smithsonian Channel among other outlets.
A wide variety of books have local settings. James Michener wrote his historical Chesapeake (Random House, 1978) while living on the Eastern Shore. Though it's fiction, the book offers a good history of the area and the watermen who make their living on the Bay.
Several other books celebrate the Chesapeake: William H. Warner's Beautiful Swimmers (Little, Brown, 1976), a Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the blue crab; An Island Out of Time (Norton, 1996), by Tom Horton, chronicles his 3 years living on remote Smith Island. Cambridge native John Barth set his epic The Sotweed Factor (Atlantic Books, 1960) on the Eastern Shore. Children have been reading Katherine Paterson's Jacob I Have Loved, a Newbery Medal winner, since Crowell published it in 1980.
Roots (Doubleday, 1976) opens in Annapolis. Author Alex Haley and his main character Kunta Kinte are remembered at the City Dock there.
Anne Tyler sets her books in and around the Baltimore neighborhood where she has lived. Several have been made into movies, most notably The Accidental Tourist (Knopf, 1985). Ladder of Years (Knopf, 1995) takes place at the beach.
Nora Roberts, a prolific romance writer, has set several of her books in her adopted state of Maryland. The four-book Chesapeake Bay collection is set in St. Michaels and Baltimore.
Baltimore native and sportswriter Frank DeFord based his novel An American Summer (Sourcebooks, 2002) in 1954 Baltimore County.
The newest Maryland-based book is James McBride's Song Yet Sung, published in 2008, which chronicles a runaway slave's experiences on the Eastern Shore.
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