New England is rich in history and culture, from its architecture to its role in America's founding, and it’s also the birthplace and home of many great artists and writers. In this issue, we'll take a closer look at some of the homes and hometowns of authors who were born or settled in New England.

Since 2010, WSSM has offered the New England Writer's Award to any amateur who makes two-way contact with stations in 10 of the places where these authors lived. Continue reading to learn more about the places these writers called home.

Lenox

Starting in Western Massachusetts, we find the homes of Edith Wharton and Nathaniel Hawthorne in Lenox. Wharton played an active role in designing her famous home, The Mount, and the surrounding gardens, on a sprawling 113 acre site. It’s believed that she wrote many of her novels while living there, including Sanctuary and The House of Mirth. She wrote of The Mount in her autobiography, A Backward Glance:

"There for over ten years I lived and gardened and wrote contentedly, and should doubtless have ended my days there, had not a grave change in my husband's health made the burden of the property too heavy."

The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, earned Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921. She became the first woman to win the award. The novel is the story of the impending marriage of a New York society couple, that is challenged when future groom, Newland Archer, falls in love with his fiancés cousin - the exotic and beautiful Countess Olenska, who has returned from Europe, plagued with scandal. Wharton uses dramatic irony in this and several of her novels, often blended with humor, to criticize the New York society that she had grown up in. In many areas of her writing, she draws a  contrast between New York's high society lifestyle, which was disappearing by the early twentieth century, and the rural inhabitants of the Berkshires, who she came to know and love. This is more clearly seen in Summer, which is set in a small Berkshire town, similar to Lenox.

To learn more about The Mount, and the 150th anniversary of Wharton’s birth, click here

Nathaniel Hawthorne, originally from Salem, Massachusetts, also lived in Lenox for a short time, in a small cottage called “The Little Red House.” The property on which the little red house stands today, (now a rebuilt one), has a vibrant history. William Aspinwall Tappan purchased the land, which extends to the shores of nearby Lake Mahkeenac (now called Stockbridge Bowl). One parcel of the property had a house on it, which Tappan rented to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family in 1850.

At first Hawthorne enjoyed living there and he was quite creative. During the spring, summer and fall of that year, he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and a childhood anthology of short stories called The Tanglewood Tales. Hawthorne eventually became disenchanted with the place, however. Richard Erlanger wrote, in A History of Tanglewood, that:

“When the first snows of winter fell  he gathered up his family and headed back to Boston, declaring he would never put up with the isolation of another Berkshire winter.”

 

For more info on Hawthorne’s Little Red House, click here.



To learn more about Melville’s Arrowhead, click here.


Stockbridge


To learn more about Mum Bet and Catharine Sedgwick, click here.


Amherst



For more info on the Emily Dickinson House and Museum, click here.


Concord


For more info about Orchard House, and the Alcott family, click here.


Hartford


To learn more about the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, click here




The next state on our tour of New England is New Hampshire, home of the poet, Robert Frost.


Derry

Frost moved about quite a bit, settling in 1900-1911 at a farmhouse, located in Derry. The simple, two-story, white clapboard structure is typical of a New England house of the era, and its been preserved, thanks in part to its being listed as a National Historic Landmark. Tours, displays, a trail, and poetry readings are all available at the park.

For more information about the Robert Frost Farm, click here.


Franconia

Robert Frost, and his wife Elinor later moved to a small home in Franconia, where they stayed until 1920. It was here that Frost wrote some of his most enduring poems, such as “Not to Keep,” written during the first world war about a husband who returns to his wife only briefly before being called back to the front lines:

            “She dared no more than ask him with her eyes
            How was it with him for a second trial.
            And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
            They had given him back to her, but not to keep.”


Frost’s language is matter-of-fact, and indelible - perhaps a product of the simple, yet rugged surroundings of rural New Hampshire. The Frost Place, as its called, continues to inspire poets today, as contemporary poets have been awarded residency there each year since 1977. Its also a place for poetic retreats and workshops, and visitors are welcome each summer.

For more information on The Frost Place, click here


Portland

One of America’s most prominent literary figures was born and raised right here in Maine, and his home was the first house museum in the state, opening in 1902. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland in 1807. The Maine Historical Society says that he, “reminded Americans of their roots, and in the process became an American icon himself.” His best works are iconic, and though influenced by European epics, poems such as “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Evangeline” are unmistakably American. There were even two movies made of Longfellow’s tragic heroine, Evangeline - one in 1922 and another in 1929 starring Delores Del Rio.

Longfellow’s home, located on Congress Street, was last lived in by Henry’s youngest sister, Anne Longfellow Pierce, who left it to the Maine Historical Society, to be preserved in memory of her brother.

Click here to learn more about Longfellow, and the Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland.


North Brooklin

Another well-known Maine writer is E.B. White, from North Brooklin. While E.B. White is best known for writing  Charlotte’s Web, and Stuart Little, he was a diverse writer, having published a collection of poems called “The Lady is Cold,” and One Man’s Meat, which is a collection of essays and columns that were first published in Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker, in the mid 1930’s. He also co-authored the widely used guide, “The Elements of Style.”

White was born in Albany, NY, and first moved to Maine in 1929, after marrying his editor, Katherine Angell, who he met in New York while writing for the New Yorker magazine. The Literary Traveler describes E.B. White’s house in North Brooklin, (which is about half way between Camden and Bar Harbor), as a “white house with acreage, and a large boathouse that became his studio.” It was here that he sat at a small table and used a manual typewriter to draft his manuscripts.  

For more information about E.B. White, and his home in North Brooklin, click here to read the article in the Literary Traveler.