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Massachusetts Literature
From John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon exhorting fellow Puritans to create a “City on a Hill” in their new land to Lowell native Jack Kerouac charting a course for the 1950s Beat Generation, Massachusetts is a cradle of original thinking and expressive writing. One hub of Massachusetts-based literature is the Boston-Cambridge-Concord circuit, where the literary and political awakening known as the American Renaissance flowered in the four to five decades bracketing 1850. The renaissance was driven by luminaries like poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, and philosopher-essayist Henry David Thoreau. Other thinkers and writers of the time who also shared the ideas, publishers, and even the houses of these men included novelist Herman Melville, the Alcott family of educators and writers, the essayist and women’s right advocate Margaret Fuller, the abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others.
Common ground for many of these thinkers was the philosophy of Transcendentalism, pioneered in this country by Emerson. Transcendentalism asserted that divinity is inborn in the human soul and that an individual’s own perceptions and intuitions were the most legitimate path to religious truth. (The definition was so vague, however, that Charles Dickens wisecracked during a visit to New England in 1842 that he was “given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental.”) Another topic that found common ground among these writers was the abolition of slavery, a fiery issue whose literary epicenter, in fact, was further north, in Brunswick, Maine, where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an important spark of the Civil War.
The connections among the Transcendentalists and other orbiting writers were many: Hawthorne met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Calvin Stowe, husband of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as a student at Bowdoin College in Maine. Hawthorne purchased his home, Wayside, in Concord from the Alcott family, which had called the house Hillside. Longfellow’s poem Evangeline was based on a theme that Hawthorne proposed and handed over to him. Melville dedicated Moby Dick to “the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Hawthorne rented the Old Manse in Concord from Emerson. Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Alcott are all buried at Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
Many of the homes and workplaces of these authors still exist and are open to the public.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1883)
Sometimes called the Sage of Concord and the éminence grise of the mid-19th century American Renaissance, Emerson was a preacher, philosopher, and poet. He wrote and preached on the harmonic connection between people and nature, and the relationship between the human soul and the Divinity, which he called the Over Soul. He was an abolitionist, a crusader for justice, and utopian, and a loyal supporter of other artists and crusaders of the time. The Emerson House, where he lived from 1835 to 1889, located at 28 Cambridge Turnpike in Concord, is now a museum.
The Old Manse
269 Monument St.
Concord, MA 01742-1837 
Phone: 978-369-3909
The Old Manse was built about 1770 by The Rev. William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now a National Historical Landmark, it sits alongside the Concord River near the North Bridge, where armed resistance of the Revolutionary War took place on April 19, 1775. Ralph Waldo Emerson drafted his famous essay “Nature” at the Old Manse. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, rented the house as their residence in the mid-1840s. Hawthorne named the house in 1846 to commemorate a newly published collection of his short stories titled Mosses from an Old Manse. The house includes two centuries of family furnishings, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing desk. A self-guided tour offers views of a vegetable garden based on one planted by Henry David Thoreau as a wedding gift to the Hawthornes. Guided house tours are offered. A self-guided landscape tour brochure is sold in museum shop.
Ralph Waldo Emerson House
28 Cambridge Turnpike
Concord, MA 01742-3700
Phone: 978-369-2236
Hours: Mid-April to October — Thursday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 to 4 p.m. Closed November to mid-April
Fee charged
Emerson lived in this home from 1835 until the time of his death in 1882. Touring the home offers an intimate view of Emerson’s life and times.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Born in Salem, Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he met Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and became lifelong friends with Franklin Pierce, the future president, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His writing successes acquired a strong foothold with the publication in 1837 of Twice-Told Tales, followed by Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), The Scarlet Letter (1850), and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The seven-gabled house in Salem that inspired the story is open to the public. The Nathaniel Hawthorne House, where the writer was born, has been moved to the seven gables property and also is open to the public. Hawthorne became acquainted through his wife, the former Sophia Peabody, with the Emerson and Alcott families. In 1842 the Hawthornes rented the Old Manse in Concord, an Emerson family home. Hawthorne, in fact, named the house in honor of a collection of his stories written there. In 1852, the Hawthorne family purchased a home in Concord from Bronson Alcott and moved there, renaming it The Wayside (the Alcotts had called the house “Hillside”). The third literary inhabitant of Wayside was Harriett Stone Lathrop, who wrote the Five Little Peppers series of children’s books in the early 20th century under the pen name Margaret Sidney.
House of the Seven Gables
54 Turner St.
Salem, MA 01970-5633
Phone: 978-744-0991
E-mail: info@7gables.org
Hours: January 13 to June 30 — 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; July 1 to October 31 — 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; November 1 to December 31 — 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free parking and continuous guided tours.
The House of the Seven Gables — which constitutes its own national historic district on The National Register of Historic Places — also is called the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion. Built in 1668, it is the oldest wooden mansion that survives in New England. The grounds of the house also contain Hawthorne’s birth home, which was moved there from its original site a few blocks distant.
The Nathaniel Hawthorne House
The Nathaniel Hawthorne House, a modest structure of Georgian style, was built in about 1750 and was originally located on Union Street in Salem. It was moved in 1958 to the property that contains the House of the Seven Gables. It was in this modest home that Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 to Elizabeth and Nathaniel Hathorne. (The author added a ‘w’ to the spelling of his name as a young man.)
The Wayside
455 Lexington Road
Concord, MA 01742-3727
Phone: 978-318-7826
Hours: May through October. Call Minute Man National Historical Park at 978-318-7826 for days and hours of operation.
Located on the Battle Road in Concord, The Wayside was home to the Louisa May Alcott and her parents and sisters, who called the home Hillside. Bronson Alcott sold the house in 1852 to Nathaniel Hawthorne. A later literary resident was Harriet Stone Lathrop (Margaret Sidney). A free exhibit called “The House, Its Authors and the Creation of an American Literary Heritage” provides a good general overview of the people and events of this time and place.
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
A child of the gifted and nonconformist Alcott family, Louisa May Alcott is best known for her novel Little Women (1868). She was also the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, an experimental educator of that time, and Abigail May Alcott, one of the first professional social workers in Massachusetts. Her sisters, Anna, Louisa May, Elizabeth, and May, were the models for Alcott’s famous novel for girls. Little Women, however enduring its appeal, was only part of Louisa May Alcott’s output as a writer. She undertook a considerable amount of serious work for adults, including poetry, stories, and nonfiction reporting, abolitionist treatises, and sensationalistic thrillers – albeit published under a pseudonym. The Alcott family’s most permanent home was Orchard House in Concord, where the family lived from 1858 to 1877, and where Louisa wrote Little Women. This home, virtually unchanged from the time the family lived there, is open to the public.
Orchard House
399 Lexington Road
PO Box 343
Concord, MA 01742-3712
Phone: 978-369-4118
E-mail: info@louisamayalcott.org
Hours: April 1 to October 31 — Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Sunday, 1 to 4 pm. November 1 to March 31 — Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Sunday, 1 to 4:30 p.m. The house is shown by guided tour only.
Orchard House is a combination of two houses dating to the early 1700s that Bronson Alcott bought and remodeled by attaching the smaller to the larger. At the time, the property was covered with apple orchards, leading to the choice of the name of the house. Lousia May Alcott wrote Little Women in this house and also set the scenes of the novel there. This often prompts visitors to exclaim that a walk through the house is like a walk through the novel. The house is virtually unchanged since the time of the Alcotts’ residence and it looks almost exactly as they would have known it.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Even casual readers of American literature are familiar with the credo of Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” An American essayist, poet, and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he ultimately became one of the central figures in the Transcendentalist group of writers and thinkers of the mid-1800s. He is best know for Walden (1854), a description of his time living simply in a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. Thoreau was born in Concord, graduated from Harvard University, and then taught school. His life took a decisive turn when he met Emerson. In 1845 Thoreau built a home on the shores of Walden Point and described his observations in A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers (1849). His essay, Civil Disobedience (1849), was a result of a overnight visit in 1846 to a jail when he refused to pay his taxes as a protest against the Mexican War. He was a committed abolitionist. Although Thoreau never earned a substantial living by his writings, his works fill 20 volumes.
Walden Pond State Reservation
915 Walden Street/Route 126
Concord, MA 01742-4511
Phone: 978-369-3245
Fee charged
Walden Pond has been designated a National Historic Landmark and is considered the birthplace of the conservation movement. The reservation covers 400 acres. Mostly undeveloped woods called Walden Woods surround the reservation. The area is popular for fishing, swimming, and walking. To protect the natural resources of the area the number of visitors is limited to no more than 1,000 people at a time. Visitors are encouraged to call the park in advance and check on parking availability. A replica of Henry David Thoreau’s house is available for viewing by the public. Year-round interpretive programs and guided walks are offered.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1837-1882)
Possibly the most popular American poet of the 19th century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his works are still studied and copied. His most famous pieces include Evangeline (1847), The Song Of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). He was born in 1807 in Portland, Maine. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was a lawyer and congressman, and mother was a descendant of John Alden of the Mayflower. After university and some travel in Europe, Longfellow returned to Maine to work as a professor and librarian in Bowdoin College, where he became acquainted with Nathaniel Hawthorne. During a later European trip he became enamored of German Romanticism. Longfellow’s later poetry reflects his interest in establishing an American mythology. His 70th birthday was celebrated around the United States. Longfellow died in Cambridge. His image in marble is located in Westminster Abbey, London, in the Poet’s Corner.
Longfellow National Historic Site
105 Brattle St.
Cambridge, MA 02138-3407
Phone: 617-876-4491
Hours: check Web site for seasonal hours of operation.
For almost half a century, from 1837 to 1882, this was the home of one of the world’s foremost poets, scholars, and educators. The house is also significant in America’s Colonial history. As commander-in-chief of the new Continental Army, Gen. George Washington planned the siege of Boston from a headquarters at this house between July 1775 and April 1776. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime and he played a central role in the intellectual life of 19th-century America. His residence was a favorite gathering place for philosophers and artists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, and Charles Sumner.
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
The grandson of two Revolutionary War heroes, Herman Melville enjoyed a privileged childhood in New York City, where he was born in 1819. But when he was 11, his father went bankrupt, forcing the family to flee creditors and move to Albany. At age 22, he signed on the whaler Acushnet for a whaling voyage. Later he joined the U.S. Navy. Urged by his family, the young man began to write down the stories of his seafaring adventures, which led to the publication of Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and other adventure stories. In 1850, while on a picnic excursion south of Pittsfield, he was introduced to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom lived in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. Melville and Hawthorne became instant friends. Melville moved to the Berkshires, bought a farm, and named his house Arrowhead. Features and images of his beloved Arrowhead figure in many of his stories. There he wrote some of his finest works, among them his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. The book was not well received by critics, but a few lines of high praise from Hawthorne buoyed Melville’s spirits enormously. During 13 years of work at Arrowhead, he failed to earn sufficient income from his writing, so he moved his family to New York City and began work as a customs inspector. His last published work was Billy Bud, published decades after his death.
Arrowhead
780 Holmes Road
Pittsfield, MA 01201-7152
Phone: 413-442-1793
E-mail: info@mobydick.org
Hours: Open daily from Memorial Day Weekend to Columbus Day from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tours begin every hour on the hour. Tours are available in the off-season by appointment only. Fee charged.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst to a highly educated and politically dynamic family. She began writing poems at about the age of 20, first in a conventional style and later in more experimental ways. She was exceedingly private, spending most of her time after the age of 23 alone in her bedroom. Of the 1,800 poems she wrote, only seven were published while she lived. Nonetheless, her letters show her familiarity with the works of John Keats, John Ruskin, and Sir Thomas Browne. Her sister began to get Dickinson’s poems published after Dickinson’s death. Her work is believed to have heavily influenced modern poetry, particularly through its irregular rhymes, broken meter, and unusual metaphors. She is considered among the most innovative of American poets.
Emily Dickinson Museum
280 Main St.
Amherst, MA 01002-2349
Phone: 413-542-8161
Hours: Open March through mid-December. Admission to the museum beyond the Tour Center is by guided tour only.
Emily Dickinson Museum consists of two historic houses in the center of Amherst. The Homestead was the birthplace and home of Emily Dickinson. The Evergreens, next door, was home to her brother Austin and his family. The tour begins at the Homestead and continues to The Evergreens. In addition to the library, parlor, dining room, and kitchen, visitors may see the children’s nursery, home to Emily Dickinson’s beloved nephews and niece.
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Edith Wharton was born into privileged society in New York City, but she cast off the strictures of a limited life bound for marriage and society. She wrote 40 books in 40 years, including The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth. She wrote authoritatively on many subjects, including architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. She was the first woman to received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; an honorary doctorate of letters from Yale University; and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Mount
Route 7 and Plunkett Street
Lenox, MA 01240
Hours: May 6 to October 29 — 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fee charged.
Edith Wharton designed the house and the gardens of the Mount in 1902, using the principles she declared in her book The Decoration of Houses (1897). She believed the design of a house should respect the principles of proportion, harmony, simplicity, and usefulness. She also thought of gardens in architectural terms. She thought of her gardens as outdoor rooms and she created unique compositions suited to the house and the natural surroundings.
Concord Museum
200 Lexington Road
Concord, MA 01742-3711
Phone: 978-369-9763
E-mail: cm1@concordmuseum.org
Hours: January to March — Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. April to December — Monday to Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. June through August — Sundays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Concord Museum, across the street from the Emerson House in Concord, presents a wide assortment of history an artifacts of New England from Colonial times, touching on such subjects as the American Revolution, Native Americans, abolitionism, industries and crafts, religion, and literature. The museum collection began in 1850 and the museum was formally founded in 1886. One of the museum’s greatest collections is a reassembly of Emerson’s study, with all his possessions in place as they would have been when he wrote his masterworks on the need for religious inquiry, lessons of nature, and the central of personal responsibility for the soul.
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Bedford Street
Concord, MA 01742
Phone: 978-318-3233
E-mail: thopkins@concordnet.org
Sleepy Hollow, the largest cemetery in Concord, contains 10,000 gravesites. It was one of the first U.S. cemeteries to be designed with a wooded character and it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. “Authors Ridge,” a hilly crest in the cemetery, is the burial place of Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and her father, Bronson Alcott. (Emerson, a member of the Cemetery Committee, served as orator during the consecration of the cemetery in 1855.) They are all buried in family plots marked by simple stones. A popular attraction of the cemetery is the sculpture Mourning Victory, also known as the Melvin Memorial. Commissioned in memory of three brothers who died during the Civil War, the memorial was created by Daniel Chester French, who also designed the Minuteman Statue at Concord’s North Bridge and the Lincoln Statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s.
Boston Athenaeum
10 1/2 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108-3703
Phone: 617-227-0270
Hours: Monday, 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Tuesday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Saturday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States, was founded in 1807 by 14 Boston men who edited The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. The library and its art gallery grew rapidly, through purchases and donations. Through the mid-1800s the Athenæum was the center of intellectual life in Boston. Today it owns more than 500,000 books, with particular emphasis on history, biography, English and American literature, and the arts.
Old Corner Bookstore
School and Washington Streets
Boston, MA 02119
Typical of the buildings of Boston in Colonial days, the Old Corner Bookstore was built as an apothecary for druggist Thomas Creese in 1718, and it became a literary center in the mid-19th century. The work of writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others were published by Ticknor and Fields Co., whose offices was located here. Now called the Globe Corner Bookstore, the business specializes in New England and travel books and maps.
Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991)
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield in 1904 and grew up in the city’s Forest Park neighborhood. His father was a parks commissioner and was in charge of the Forest Park Zoo, a regular playground for young Theodor. In later years, Geisel, as Dr. Seuss, credited his mother with his love for rhyming because she had often talked her children to sleep with chanted rhymes. Images of Springfield can be found throughout Dr. Seuss’s work. His first children’s book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, shows a man resembling the city’s mayor and police officers riding red motorcycles, typical of the Indian brand motorcycles for which the city became famous. Geisel left Springfield as a teenager to attend Dartmouth College, where he became editor-in-chief of the university’s humor magazine. Here he first began using his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Geisel continued his studies at Oxford University in England, then toured Europe and met his future wife, Helen Palmer.
Back in the United States, Geisel began working as a cartoonist and his work was published in The Saturday Evening Post. He also produced advertising art for Standard Oil for more than 15 years. During World War II, Geisel contributed political cartoons to the liberal magazine PM and made training movies with the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army. Later, Viking Press offered him a contract to illustrate a collection of children’s sayings. The first book that Geisel wrote and illustrated, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times before being published by Vanguard Press. Later, with the publication of The Cat in the Hat, Geisel became an established and popular children’s book author and illustrator. When he died in 1991, Geisel had written and illustrated 44 children’s books. More than 200 million copies have been sold.
Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden
Springfield Museums
State and Chestnut Streets
Springfield, MA 01103
Phone: 800-625-7738
The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden is now open at the Springfield Museums in Springfield, Theodor Seuss Geisel’s home town. Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, Geisel’s step-daughter, sculpted the large bronze sculptures of Dr. Seuss and his most beloved characters. Clustered together at the corner of the Quadrangle green near the Springfield Library are several large groupings: Theodor Geisel at his drawing board with the Cat in the Hat at his side; a 14-foot Horton the Elephant stepping out of an open book, accompanied by Thing One, Thing Two, Sam-I-Am, Sally, her brother, and Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose; and a storytelling chair, backed by a 10-foot-tall book with the text of Oh, the Places You'll Go! with Gertrude McFuzz perched on top and the Grinch and his dog, Max, peeking around the side.
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