|
New England Literature
--- CONNECTICUT ---
Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A prolific journalist, fiction writer, essayist, and lecturer, Samuel Clemens enjoyed a life that spanned enormous changes in the American character and landscape. Born in Missouri, a slave-holding state, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Clemens traveled the world and died a decade before World War I, when the United States was on the threshold of becoming a global leader. Clemens traveled widely but built a home in Connecticut, where he would spend some of his most productive years, creating, among other works, his masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and spent much of his childhood among his father’s and uncle’s slaves, hearing the slaves’ stories and spirituals. His first job, at 11, was as a printer’s apprentice at a local newspaper, launching his reporting and writing career. After working at newspapers in New York City and Philadelphia, Clemens returned at age 22 to Missouri to work as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi. The outbreak of the Civil War ended river traffic, so Clemens headed west, picking up stories that would later appear in his book, Roughing It. He wrote for newspapers in Nevada and San Francisco, using the pen name Mark Twain. He also took a reporting trip for the Sacramento paper to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). Later travels to Europe and the Holy Land were chronicled in his first book, The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870, and in 1871 the family moved to Hartford. In 1873, Clemens turned to social criticism, co-writing The Gilded Age, an attack on corruption, big business, and American greed.
A year later after publication of The Gilded Age, Clemens’s lavish, 19-room house on Farmington Avenue in Hartford was completed. The couple and their three daughters lived on Farmington Avenue until 1891. Here, Clemens wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Because of bad investments during these years, Clemens was approaching bankruptcy. The family moved to Europe to economize and pay off debts. During these years his work became more critical of imperialistic behaviors by America and Europe. On a visit back to Hartford, the couple’s oldest daughter died from meningitis at age 24, and her parents never returned to Hartford to live. The rest of his life was spent in Europe and New York before a final move to Redding, Connecticut, in 1908, two years before Clemens’s death.
The Mark Twain House & Museum
351 Farmington Ave.
Hartford, Connecticut 06105 
Phone: 860-247-0998
Hours: Monday through Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Sunday noon to 5:30 p.m.; closed Tuesdays January to April.
Cost: Fee charged. Admission is by guided tour only. Free parking. Visitors should allow at least two hours for the tour and a visit to the museum.
Whimsical and full of odd details and flourishes, the Mark Twain house, where the family lived from 1874 to 1891, was designed by architect Edward Tuckerman Potter. The 19-room house is light-hearted and unpredictable. It has many different levels and asymmetrical gables. Chimneys and towers jut from broad, sweeping roof lines Many styles from distant cultures are presented in pattern, texture, and color. An eclectic taste combines northern Africa, Asian, and Indian images.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Harriet Beecher Stowe is remembered most today as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold 10,000 copies in its first week off the press and helped solidify opposition to slavery before the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln greeted her during a visit in 1862 as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” After publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe became an international celebrity and very popular author.
Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, to a dynamic Congregationalist minister who preached vociferously against slavery. The family prized education, and many of the Harriet’s 10 brothers and sisters became social reformers. Harriet attended and later taught at Hartford Female Seminary. In 1832 her father moved the family to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took a position at Lane Theological Seminary. There, Harriet met and married Calvin E. Stowe, a professor at Lane, and the two began to establish their family. Cincinnati was across the river from Kentucky, a slave state, and it was here that Harriet observed and learned to abhor slavery.
In 1850 Calvin Stowe moved the family to Brunswick, Maine, where he joined the faculty of his alma mater, Bowdoin College. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was first published in an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era, was written largely in Brunswick. In 1852 the story was published in book form. Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the evils of slavery to the attention of Americans more vividly than ever before.
From Brunswick, the Stowes moved in 1863 to Andover, Massachusetts, where Calvin taught at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1864, after his retirement, the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. Here they built their house, Oakholm. In 1873, the Stowes moved to their last home, the brick Victorian house on Forest Street in Hartford.
Harriet Beecher Stowe House and Library
77 Forest Street
Hartford, Connecticut 06105
Phone: 860-522-9258 or 860-522-9258 ext. 317
Hours: Open year-round. Mondays from Memorial Day to Columbus Day and the month of December 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Tuesday through Saturday all year 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Sunday noon to 4:30 p.m.
Cost: Fee charged
This historic site includes a Visitor Center that occupies a carriage house built in 1873, a museum shop, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, which is open for tours, and the Katharine Seymour Day House. A tour of the Stowe House provides an intimate glimpse into the life of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Day House offers magnificent interiors with changing exhibits and a research library. Guided tours of the Victorian gardens are offered seasonally.
--- MAINE ---
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Harriet Beecher Stowe is remembered most today as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold 10,000 copies in its first week off the press and helped solidify opposition to slavery before the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln greeted her during a visit in 1862 as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” After publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe became an international celebrity and very popular author.
Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, to a dynamic Congregationalist minister who preached vociferously against slavery. The family prized education, and many of the Harriet’s 10 brothers and sisters became social reformers. Harriet attended and later taught at Hartford Female Seminary. In 1832 her father moved the family to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took a position at Lane Theological Seminary. There, Harriet met and married Calvin E. Stowe, a professor at Lane, and the two began to establish their family. Cincinnati was across the river from Kentucky, a slave state, and it was here that Harriet observed and learned to abhor slavery.
In 1850 Calvin Stowe moved the family to Brunswick, Maine, where he joined the faculty of his alma mater, Bowdoin College. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was first published in an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era, was written largely in Brunswick. In 1852 the story was published in book form. Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the evils of slavery to the attention of Americans more vividly than ever before.
From Brunswick, the Stowes moved in 1863 to Andover, Massachusetts, where Calvin taught at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1864, after his retirement, the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. Here they built their house, Oakholm. In 1873, the Stowes moved to their last home, the brick Victorian house on Forest Street in Hartford.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House
63 Federal St.
Brunswick, Maine 04011
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House, a National Historic Landmark, is the place where this influential writer penned her monumental novel, forever changing America’s attitude toward slavery. The house currently operates as a restaurant and hotel and is open to the public.
--- MASSACHUSETTS ---
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.
--- NEW HAMPSHIRE ---
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Robert Frost, whose writings are often considered to capture the heart and soul of New England, was born in 1874 in San Francisco. When he was 11 his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He began writing poetry in high school. Frost entered Dartmouth University, stayed for one semester, and then returned to Massachusetts to briefly teach school. In 1894, he sold one of his poems, “My Butterfly: An Elegy” to a national magazine, the Independent. He married in 1895 and attended Harvard College. In 1900, Frost’s paternal grandfather, worried by the young Robert’s apparent lack of ambition, bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire for Robert’s use. The farm was completely isolated. For Frost, who especially enjoyed the seclusion, the farm was an ideal setting to raise his family and continue to write poetry in private. In 1906, Frost secured a position to teach English at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy.
The Frost family moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed. During his time abroad, Frost met and was influenced by several accomplished British poets. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections and his reputation was established. In 1917, he began teaching at Amherst College. He was co-founder of the Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, eventually winning four Pulitzer Prizes. After Frost’s wife Elinor died in 1938, he purchased the Homer Noble farm in Ripton, Vermont. The farm became for him a place of refuge and restoration, and was his final permanent residence. On Frost’s 89th birthday in 1962, he received a special Congressional Medal of Honor. The same day, his last book of new poems was published. He died in Boston.
Robert Frost Farm
Route 28
Derry, New Hampshire 03038
Phone: 603-432-3091
Hours: Open from Memorial Day weekend to mid-June on Saturdays and Sundays only, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; from mid-June to Labor Day, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through
Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Closed Mondays.
Cost: Admission fee charged
Robert Frost and his family lived at this farm from 1900 to 1911. The simple two-story white clapboard farmhouse is typical of a rural New England residence of the 1880s. Guided house tours, a children’s garden, walks along the Hyla Brook Trail, a summer lecture series, and poetry readings on selected Sundays are all available at the park. The Hyla Brook Trail is an interpretive trail with an accompanying brochure. Books and other Frost-related items may be purchased at the Visitor’s Center.
The Frost Place
Ridge Road
P.O. Box 74
Franconia, New Hampshire 03580
Phone: 603-823-5510
E-mail: rfrost@ncia.net
Hours: Memorial Day weekend 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; month of June, Saturdays and
Sundays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; July 2 to August 31 daily except Tuesdays 1 to 5
p.m.; July 31 to August 6 daily except Tuesdays 3 to 5 p.m. and poetry
reading 8 p.m.; September 1 to October 10 daily except Tuesdays 10 a.m. to
5 p.m.
Cost: Fee charged
The Frost Place, a farmstead in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where Robert Frost lived and worked, is now a non-profit Center for Poetry and the Arts owned by the town of Franconia. Two rooms of the farmhouse are used as a museum of Frost’s life and work with signed first editions of his books. Visitors view the rooms where Frost lived and wrote and see an engaging half-hour video about his life. A half-mile Poetry-Nature Trail though fields and woods presents displays of Frost’s Franconia poems mounted on plaques, surrounded by dozens of New England wildflowers and plants. Each summer, a nationally honored poet has been chosen to come live and work in the house where Frost wrote some of his best work. The summer program begins in early July on a publicly designated “Frost Day,” with a reading by the summer poet-in-residence. It culminates in the first part of August with two weeks of public poetry readings.
--- RHODE ISLAND ---
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
A Providence native and author of horror stories and novels, Lovecraft is considered the father of American science fiction and a successor to Edgar Allen Poe. He is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos stories. Some of his stories describe an imaginary place named Arkham that was based Providence. He was born in 1890 at the house currently numbered 454 Angell Street. The boy’s father, a salesman, went mad, was institutionalized, and died when the young Lovecraft was 5. For all his life, Lovecraft suffered from terrifying nightmares. He grew up on the fringe of New England upper society, but suffered from poor health and an overprotective mother. He was a copious reader, discovering The Arabian Nights, Greek mythology, and Edgar Allan Poe at an early age. His fascination with the macabre and weird may have begun with the stories he heard from his grandfather, who, along with his mother and two aunts, helped raise the boy.
After two and half years of high school, he had a nervous breakdown and failed to finish his work for a diploma. However, he was fascinated by science and he began writing about science and astronomy for magazines and local newspapers. The publisher of Weird Tales magazine became interested the young Rhode Island recluse and bought everything Lovecraft wrote. Lovecraft’s mother died when the author was 31 and he lived thereafter with his two aunts. He had a short, two-year marriage in the mid-1920s and spent some time living in New York, which he hated. His fiction turned from the nostalgic (The Shunned House) to the bleak and misanthropic (The Horror at Red Hook and He). In 1926 he moved back to Providence. There, he wrote some of his greatest fiction, from The Call of Cthulhu to At the Mountains of Madness to The Shadow Out of Time. He had found his niche as a writer of weird fiction and correspondence. He died of cancer in 1937 and was buried in Swan Point Cemetery.
The Gravestone of H. P. Lovecraft
Swan Point Cemetery
585 Blackstone Blvd.
Providence, Rhode Island 02906
Phone: 401-272-1314 or 401-272-3570
Hours: Open Daily 7:30am-5pm
When Lovecraft died in 1937, his name was added to a family monument. It was not until many years later that this individual monument was erected at his gravesite.
H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Plaque
John Hay Library
20 Prospect St.
Providence, Rhode Island 02910
Phone: 401-863-3723
Erected on the centennial of his birth (August 20, 1990), this plaque is just north of the entrance to the John Hay Library, where most of Lovecraft’s original manuscripts are kept.
598 Angell St.
Providence, Rhode Island 02906
Lovecraft’s home from 1904 to 1924, when he married and moved to New York for the following two years.
10 Barnes St.
Providence, Rhode Island 02906
This was the home of Lovecraft from April 1926 to May 1933. This house’s address was listed as that of Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Clement C. Moore (1779-1863)
A man known throughout the Western world as the author of the poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and who created the sentimental image of Christmas at home, was born in 1779, in a large estate that cover the present-day area of 18th to 24th streets between Eighth and Tenth avenues in Manhattan. He was the son of Benjamin Moore, Episcopal bishop of New York, rector of Trinity Church, and president of Columbia College. Moore graduated first in his class from Columbia University in 1798. He became a well-known and respected scholar and wrote on a wide variety of topics such as religion, languages, politics, and poetry. When he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1822, at the age of 43, Moore was a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Moore, who wished to be remembered for his scholarly work, was embarrassed for most of his life that his scholarly works were overshadowed by the poem, which he considered a trivial work. Nevertheless, it has become a beloved classic. He died in Newport, his summer home, in 1863, just before his 84th birthday.
Cedars, Clement C. Moore House, or The Night
Before Christmas House
25 Catherine St.
Newport, Rhode Island 02840
Now divided into apartments, the house (c. 1856) is where Moore died after long and fruitful life. There is no truth to the myth that he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” here, because he did not begin summering in Newport until about the 1850s.
--- VERMONT ---
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Rudyard Kipling, the storyteller of British colonial India of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, carved a place for himself as poet of the British Empire and herald of the common British soldier, whom he glorified in many of his works. Kipling was born in 1865, the son of English parents living in Bombay, India. As a child, he was educated in England, but he returned in his late teens to India, where he worked for newspapers and published his first literary work, Departmental Ditties, in 1886. Returning to England in 1889, Kipling won instant success with Barrack-Room Ballads. In 1892 he married Carrie Balestier, the sister of his American friend and literary collaborator Wolcott Balestier. That year, he and his wife moved to America and sought peace and privacy near Mrs. Kipling’s family in Vermont. Working with New York architect Henry Marshall, Kipling had a new house constructed in the popular Shingle style and named it Naulakha, which means “precious jewel.” Kipling often referred to the view of the Wantastiquet mountain range and Mount Monadnock as rising “like a giant thumbnail pointing heavenward.” At Naulakha Kipling wrote The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. The Jungle Book became a children’s classic all over the world. Other works include The Second Jungle Book, The Seven Seas, Captains Courageous, and many more.
Naulakha (Kipling House)
Kipling Road
Dummerston, VT 05301
Strange as it seems, Mowgli, the jungle boy, Shere Khan, the ruthless tiger, and Bagheera, the fearsome panther — all inhabitants of The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling — were brought to life in the very un-tropical mountains of Vermont, where Kipling lived and wrote from 1892 to 1896. Although the jungle characters and images were conceived during Kipling’s childhood in India, they came to life on paper within the walls of Naulakha, the house Kipling built in Dummerston, near Brattleboro. Naulakha has been restored by the Landmark Trust, a British nonprofit foundation devoted to preserving historic homes. Landmark Trust rents out the property as a summer home and winter ski chalet. It is not open to the public but is visible from public roads.
Many of the original Kipling furnishings remained after the house was sold by the Kipling family in 1903. The Kiplings left plaster statues presented by William Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus stories; the desk at which Kipling wrote The Jungle Book series; and a teakwood sideboard from India. Naulakha is one of the best-preserved estates in Vermont from this period.
Marlboro College Rice-Aron Library
64 Dalrymple Road
Marlboro, Vermont 05344
Phone: 802-258-9221
E-mail: library@marlboro.edu
Rice-Aron Library at Marlboro College houses an intriguing Rudyard Kipling collection focusing on the writer’s stay in Vermont.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Robert Frost, whose writings are often considered to capture the heart and soul of New England, was born in 1874 in San Francisco. When he was 11 his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He began writing poetry in high school. Frost entered Dartmouth University, stayed for one semester, and then returned to Massachusetts to briefly teach school. In 1894, he sold one of his poems, “My Butterfly: An Elegy” to a national magazine, the Independent. He married in 1895 and attended Harvard College. In 1900, Frost’s paternal grandfather, worried by the young Robert’s apparent lack of ambition, bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire for Robert’s use. The farm was completely isolated. For Frost, who especially enjoyed the seclusion, the farm was an ideal setting to raise his family and continue to write poetry in private. In 1906, Frost secured a position to teach English at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy.
The Frost family moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed. During his time abroad, Frost met and was influenced by several accomplished British poets. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections and his reputation was established. In 1917, he began teaching at Amherst College. He was co-founder of the Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, eventually winning four Pulitzer Prizes. After Frost’s wife Elinor died in 1938, he purchased the Homer Noble farm in Ripton, Vermont. The farm became for him a place of refuge and restoration, and was his final permanent residence. On Frost’s 89th birthday in 1962, he received a special Congressional Medal of Honor. The same day, his last book of new poems was published. He died in Boston.
Robert Frost Stone House Museum
121 Historic Route 7A
Shaftsbury, Vermont 05262
Phone: 802-447-6200
Hours: Open May 1 to December 29, Tuesday through Sunday (closed Mondays) 10
a.m. to 5 p.m. December hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., weather permitting.
Cost: Fee charged
Frost’s Stone House Museum features galleries in the house where Robert Frost lived and wrote some of his best poetry. His fourth book, titled New Hampshire, was published during this period and it won him his first Pulitzer Prize. One of his most beloved poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was composed on a hot June morning in 1922 at the dining room table. The grounds of the property are complete with many images that evoke Frost’s poetry including stone walls, birch trees, fields and woods, and even some of Frost’s original apple trees.
Robert Frost Memorial Drive
East Middlebury, Vermont 05766
A 14-mile route through woods, farmlands, and mountains starting at the junction of U.S. Route 7 and Vermont Route 125 in East Middlebury, Vermont. Two miles east of Ripton is the Robert Frost Wayside Area, where the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail begins.
Robert Frost Interpretive Trail
Route 125
Middlebury, Vermont 05753
This three-quarter-mile trail in the Green Mountain National Forest is about one mile west of the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College. It winds through woodland, and plaques along the trail contain quotations from Frost poems. Picnic space is available near the trailhead.
Old Bennington Cemetery
Route 9
Bennington, Vermont 05201
Robert Frost purchased a plot in the cemetery of the Old Bennington Congregational Church after the deaths of his wife Elinor and his son Carol. Robert Frost died on January 28, 1963 in Boston. A private memorial service was held in Appleton Chapel of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. A few weeks later a public memorial service was held in Johnson Chapel of Amherst College. On June 16, 1963, Frost’s ashes were buried in the plot at the Old Bennington Cemetery. The epitaph that he chose was, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
|
