Benedict Arnold is remembered as the quintessential American traitor, but he had a far different reputation for much of his life. Eventually promoted to major general in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, Arnold defected to the British in 1780, after trying to surrender West Point to them.
Before he became a despised turncoat, however, Arnold was a revered hero of the American cause who helped capture Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and played a prominent role in the American victory at Saratoga in 1777. Sandwiched between those successes was Arnold’s brazen but failed attempt to seize Québec from the British in late 1775.
It is that remarkable campaign, which involved an army’s now-legendary march through the trackless wilds of Maine as the seasons turned from fall to winter, that Kenneth Roberts chronicles in Arundel. A Maine-born writer of historical fiction, Roberts, who died in 1957, released the novel some 90 years ago.
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