April 22, 2012

Art and Nan Kellam bought an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine in 1949 and lived there for more than 35 years, content with little more than each other’s company. They had no electricity or running water, and heated the house they built with firewood from their forest. To fetch supplies, they rowed a dory several miles to the mainland and back.

New Jersey native and avid conservationist Peter Blanchard III tells the unusual love story of Art and Nan Kellam in “We Were an Island,” a book based largely on journals kept by the Kellams.…