Born on November 30, 1824, in Eastport, Maine, Mary Green grew up and attended school in nearby Calais. From 1840 to 1843 she studied at the Female Seminary in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In September 1845 she married Frederick A. Pike, a lawyer of Calais. In 1854 she published a novel, Ida May, under the pseudonym ╥Mary Langdon.╙ The melodramatic tale of a child of wealthy white parents who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, the book was an immediate success. Riding to some extent on the coattails of Uncle Tom╒s Cabin, published two years before, Ida May sold some 60,000 copies in less than two years and appeared in several British editions and in German translation. In 1856 she published Caste: A Story of Republican Equality under the name ╥Sydney A. Story, Jr.╙ Caste told of a quadroon girl forbidden to marry a white man, and while it was less successful than Ida May it received much favorable critical comment. Agnes, 1858, her last book, concerned a North American protagonist in the time of the Revolution. Pike also contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, Harper╒s, Graham╒s, and other magazines. She later abandoned writing for landscape painting. From 1861 to 1869, while her husband sat in Congress, she lived in Washington, D.C. They then passed several years in Europe before returning to Calais. After her husband╒s death in 1886 she lived in Plainfield, New Jersey. She died in Baltimore on January 15, 1908.
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