The highest federal officeholders born in Maine were Hannibal Hamlin (1809–91), the nation's first Republican vice president, under Abraham Lincoln, and Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908–79), governor of New York State from 1959 to 1973 and US vice president under Gerald Ford. James G. Blaine (b.Pennsylvania, 1830–93), a lawyer and politician, served 13 years as a US representative from Maine and a term in the Senate; on his third try, he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1884 but lost to Grover Cleveland, later serving as secretary of state (1889–92) under Benjamin Harrison. Edmund S. Muskie (1914–96), leader of the Democratic revival in Maine in the 1950s, followed two successful terms as governor with 21 years in the Senate until appointed secretary of state by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Other conspicuous state and national officeholders have included Rufus King (1755–1827), a member of the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention and US minister to Great Britain; William King (1768–1852), leader of the movement for Maine statehood and the state's first governor; Thomas Bracket Reed (1839–1902), longtime speaker of the US House of Representatives; and Margaret Chase Smith (1897–1995), who served longer in the US Senate—24 years—than any other woman.
Names prominent in Maine's colonial history include those of Sir Ferdinando Gorges (b.England, 1566–1647), the founder and proprietor of the colony; Sir William Phips (1651–95), who became the first American knight for his recovery of a Spanish treasure, later serving as royal governor of Massachusetts; and Sir William Pepperrell (1696–1759), who led the successful New England expedition against Louisburg in 1745, for which he became the first American-born baronet.
Maine claims a large number of well-known reformers and humanitarians: Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802–87), who led the movement for hospitals for the insane; Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802–37), an abolitionist killed while defending his printing press from a proslavery mob in St. Louis, Missouri; Neal Dow (1804–97), who drafted and secured passage of the Maine prohibition laws of 1846 and 1851, later served as a Civil War general, and ran for president on the Prohibition Party ticket in 1880; and Harriet Beecher Stowe (b.Connecticut, 1811–96), whose Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was written in Maine.
Other important writers include poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), born in Portland while Maine was still part of Massachusetts; humorist Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne, 1834–67); Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), novelist and short-story writer; Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923), author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; Kenneth Roberts (1885–1957), historical novelist; and Robert Peter Tristram Coffin (1892–1955), poet, essayist, and novelist. Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) were both Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, and novelist Marguerite Yourcenar (b.Belgium, 1903–1987), a resident of Mt. Desert Island, became in 1980 the first woman ever elected to the Académie Française. Richard Russo (b.New York, 1949), whose Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002, lives in Camden. Stephen King (b.1947), perhaps Maine's best-known writer of popular fiction, lives in Bangor. Winslow Homer (b.Massachusetts, 1836–1910) had a summer home at Prouts Neck, where he painted many of his seascapes.