An Honest Fame
An Honest Fame is a novel I spent five whole years writing. It chronicles the lives of Robert and Sally Townsend, a pair of real-life siblings from Long Island who lived through the Revolutionary War.
I took the title from the final line of a poem by Alexander Pope, “The Temple of Fame.” The book’s full title is An Honest Fame: The Story of Robert and Sally Townsend.
Robert is more famous than his sister, though he wasn’t in the public eye until 1930. That was when Morton Pennypacker, a Long Island historian, published his findings on the hitherto-unidentified members of George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring. He discovered that the mysterious “Samuel Culper, Junior” was actually Robert Townsend of Oyster Bay, Long Island.
Robert Townsend’s signature as Culper Junior. From the George Washington Papers, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Townsends and the Culper Spy Ring are now better-known than they used to be. This is chiefly due to the non-fiction works of Alexander Rose and Brian Kilmeade, and more recently to the 2014—2017 AMC television series, Turn: Washington’s Spies.
An Honest Fame is not the first fictional work to feature real-life characters who spied for George Washington. But its specific focus is on the lives of Robert and Sally Townsend, and the story unfolds strictly from their point of view.
This book is now available at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble.
Raynham Hall, in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. Homestead of the Townsend family.