Boston Literary History
Places
Old North Church
193 Salem St., Boston, MA 02113
“Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…” The Old North Church is, of course, famous as the start of Paul Revere’s ride in 1775 and the two lanterns — “one if by land, two if by sea” — set in the steeple. But it was truly memorialized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s beloved 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
Old West Church
131 Cambridge St., Boston, MA 02114
Built in 1806, the Old West Church has had several functions in its time — one of them being the location of the Boston Public Library’s West End branch from 1894 to 1960. It’s also where two notable Bostonians worked: George Washington Forbes (1864-1927), the first Black librarian in the BPL system, and Fanny Goldstein (1895-1961), the first Jewish woman head of a BPL branch and founder of Jewish Book Week (read more about her in our article “The Librarian of the West End: Fanny Goldstein”).
African Meeting House
8 Smith Ct., Boston, MA 02114
Built in 1806, the African Meeting House was once a church, then a school, and now houses the Museum of African American History, which hosts the annual Stone Book Award. But this location also hosted authors Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart, publisher William Lloyd Garrison, and others.
Louise Imogen Guiney
16 Pinckney St., Boston, MA 02114
Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Roxbury in 1861 to Irish immigrant parents and lived at one point on literary Pinckney Street. In addition to being a poet “known for her lyrical, Old English-style poems that often recall the literary conventions of seventeenth-century English poetry,” essayist, fairy tale writer, biographer, and more, Guiney was also a cataloguer for the Boston Public Library.
Alcott Family House
20 Pinckney St., Boston, MA 02114
When Louisa May Alcott was 20 in 1852, the Alcott family moved (yet again!) from Concord to Beacon Hill. It was at 20 Pinckney Street when Alcott sold her first story, “The Rival Painters: a Tale of Rome,” and her first novel, Flower Fables. Read more in our article “Four Doors of Pinckney Street: Louisa May Alcott.”
Longfellow Bridge and Fanny Applegate Pedestrian Bridge
Beacon Hill/Esplanade
The Longfellow Bridge, or the Salt and Pepper Bridge, is probably the largest literary-related site in Boston, named for poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). But the naming choice wasn’t random. Longfellow would walk over the West Boston Bridge (now the Longfellow) to visit his wife, Fanny Appleton (1817-1861) in Beacon Hill, and wrote about it in his 1845 poem “The Bridge.” Additionally, the new pedestrian bridge that connects to the Longfellow over the Esplanade, opened in 2019, was named for her: the Frances Appleton Bridge.
Sylvia Plath’s Home
9 Willow St., Boston, MA 02108
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), author of The Bell Jar and other works, and husband Ted Hughes, moved to Beacon Hill in 1958, though only stayed a year. However, when she was here, Plath attended Robert Lowell’s poetry course at BU, with fellow classmates Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Legend has it that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton would head to the Street Bar at the Ritz-Carlton, now Newbury Boston, for martinis and free peanuts after class.
Elizabeth Peabody’s Book Shop Site
13 West St., Boston, MA 02111
In 1842, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894) opened a bookshop on West St., which was located next to where the Brattle Book Shop is today. It was part bookstore, part publisher, and part literary meeting place. Probably the most well-known group that met there was the Transcendentalists at Margaret Fuller’s salon, and it was also where The Dial, the short-run Transcendentalist literary mag, was published. (Fun fact: Elizabeth’s sister Sophia Peabody married Nathaniel Hawthorne here in 1842.)
The Make Way for Ducklings
Public Garden
The Make Way for Ducklings sculptures, based on the book by Robert McCloskey in the Public Garden will celebrate its 34th birthday this week on October 7. It was installed in 1987, and was created by sculptor Nancy Schön, based on the children's book. Fun fact: There's a duplicate in Moscow.
Photo from this WBUR story on Nancy Schön
Province House Steps
51 Province St.
These steps on Province Street near Downtown Crossing belong to the original Province House, built in 1679 and destroyed in 1922. The Province House was the inspiration for the stories “Legends of the Province House,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Twice-Told Tales. Read more in our article “Hawthorne's Province House.”