A reader's guide to literary Boston
Over more than 350 years, dozens of authors have written lyrically -- and knowingly -- about Boston. In fact, they started doing so even at its birth. John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, envisioned it in 1630 as a shining "city on a hill." Oliver Wendell Holmes called the State House in 1858 "the hub of the Solar System" (which tongue-in-cheek Bostonians adapted into "hub of the universe"). Such terms may seem a stretch today, but the city's rich written heritage still flourishes, with fictional characters riding the Red Line, scouting the Big Dig, and plotting murder at the old Boston Garden -- as you'll see below.
"High in the sky, poised in the right place, over everything that clustered below, the most felicitous object in Boston -- the gilded dome of the State House."
2. "For the Union Dead" by Robert Lowell (Shaw Monument)
"Two months after marching through Boston,/half the regiment was dead; at the dedication,/William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe./Their monument sticks like a fishbone/in the city's throat."
3. "Joy Street" by Frances Parkinson Keyes
"[The coming-out season for Boston debutantes] began with a Sunday luncheon, given by Emily and Roger at their Joy Street house, a function very lavish of its kind, but almost immediately eclipsed by the elaborate dinner which Old Mrs. Forbes gave on Louisburg Square."
4. "Sarah's Long Walk" by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick
"Over the crest and then down Joy Street...The steep descent increases once you walk past the infamous cross street of Pinckney, long ago designed effectively to separate the elite side of Beacon Hill from the north slope, where the poor servants and tradespeople lived, which before the Civil War was one of the largest free black communities in America. Warm lights from Smith Court spill out into the dark street, the old center of black Boston."
5. "The Education of Henry Adams" by Henry Adams
"One of the commonest boy-games of winter, inherited directly from the eighteenth-century, was a game of war on Boston Common. In old days the two hostile forces were called North Enders and South Enders. In 1850 ... it was a battle of the Latin School against all comers."
6. "One Boy's Boston" by Samuel Eliot Morison
"Almost the entire square between the backs of Beacon, River and Mt. Vernon Streets, and the river, was occupied by stables big and little....Chestnut Street between Charles and the river was called "Horse-Chestnut Street" in derision."
"In the summer of 1960, Boston's West End was bulldozed to rubble.... When the dust cleared, there was Charles River Park. ... The tall, pale buildings had no ties to New England, so to grab some local flavor, they named the towers after Hawthorne, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, and Longfellow. I like to imagine those old dead white guys rolling in their graves. Not to mention stogie-smoking Amy Lowell."
"[Miss Pride] said there was no time today to acquaint me with Boston's points of interest ... but she would show me the one thing which she had always felt was the jewel of the city. She would not care about the destruction of everything else, the First Church or the Gardens or King's Chapel, if only the Granary Burying Ground were preserved."
9. "Pickman's Model" by H. P. Lovecraft
"Gad, how [Pickman] could paint! There was a study called "Subway Accident," in which a whole flock of ... vile things were clambering up from some underground catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd on the platform."
10. "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy
"[Having awakened from imagining a futurist Boston], I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood and laughed aloud.... For my life I could not have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at the sight of the interminable rows of stores.... Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! "
11. "The Bostonians" by Henry James
"The [Music Hall, now Orpheum Theater] struck [Basil] with a kind of Roman vastness; the doors which opened out of the upper balconies, high aloft, and which were constantly swinging to and fro with the passage of spectators and ushers, reminded him of the vomitoria that he had read about in descriptions of the Colosseum."
12. "The Last Hurrah" by Edwin O'Connor
"This morning, once within the [Old City Hall], progress had been slow: there were more well-wishers lining [Mayor Skeffington's] path from the outer door. ...He made a short speech, thanking all those assembled for their anticipated support in the campaign to come."
13. "Back Bay" by William Martin
"[Journalist Jack C. Ferguson] hurried down Beacon Hill, past the courthouse, and into Scollay Square, where the lunchtime crowd was gathering. Lunch in Scollay Square: two drinks in the Domino Lounge watching Shirl the Twirl and her tassels.
14. "Common Ground" by J. Anthony Lukas
"Some called it a 'chicken coop,' 'a Mayan cistern,' or 'Disneyland East,' but to [Mayor Kevin White's aide Colin Diver, the New City Hall] was a symbol of the bold, imaginative Boston they were trying to build.... As its base was rooted in the red brick of old Boston, so the upper reaches soared in shafts of gray precast concrete."
15. "The Big Dig" by Linda Barnes
"To [private investigator Carlotta Carlyle] it looked like a huge hole in the ground, a gaping horizontal wound bridged by decking, stuffed with scaffolding, trucks, and mysterious machinery.... One guy was pushing a broom around the hard-packed earth at the bottom of the massive trench. The rest were milling aimlessly ... sitting on piles of iron bars. At union wages, they were an expensive bunch of bench-warmers."
"My own first ride on a swan boat occurred at the age of three and is chiefly memorable for the fact that one of the live swans paddling around us bit my mother's finger when she offered it a peanut. I remember the hole in the black kid glove and a drop of blood."
17. "Make Way for Ducklings" by Robert McCloskey
"Just as they were getting ready to start on their way, a strange enormous bird came by. It was pushing a boat full of people, and there was a man sitting on its back. 'Good morning,' quacked Mr. Mallard, being polite. The big bird was too proud to answer."
18. "The Address Book" by Anne Bernays
"Phyllis insisted they take a cab to the Ritz; Alicia would have preferred to walk but didn't say so. They were given a table right away in the Cafe -- the maitre d' called Phyllis by name -- and sat down by the brownish glass windows. 'I always like this place,' Phyllis said. "It makes me think money doesn't have to be a problem.' "
19. "Massachusetts" by Nancy Zaroulis
"The Back Bay had been building for thirty years and more now, and at last it had begun to look the way it was intended to look: like the long, elegant boulevards of Baron Hausmann's Paris... In that age of restless, ruthless individualism, every architect here bent his ego to the demands of the entire streetscape; it would have been thought bad manners to attempt a design that did not fit."
"[Spenser] could hear no conversation among the pursuit ... but they didn't need to talk.... We were at the verge of the harbor, where the Charles emptied into the Atlantic through a series of locks.... The wet air was strong with the smell of the salt sea, and the faint echo-y sense of moving water."
21. "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" by George V. Higgins
" 'I don't know where you want me to go,' the kid said. He was backing the car around over the trolley tracks.... 'Go around the front of the Garden,' Dillon said. 'Go out past the Registry and head for Monsignor O'Brien Highway, in case he wakes up. You just drive now.' 'I know what's going on,' the kid said. 'Good,' said Dillon, 'I'm glad to hear that. You just drive.' "
22. "The Living Is Easy" by Dorothy West
"Curb salesmen shouted their wares, their piled-up produce blocking the sidewalks along with retail buyers inspecting the open crates.... Faneuil Hall was a droning hive in and out of which darted agile jobbers to inform the busy sellers, at their rented stalls, of merchandise en route by train or boat from every corner of the country and the farthest reaches of the earth."
"We had seen the best of it anyway. [Visiting Boston in the 1880s from South Dakota] we had tasted the ocean and found it really salt, and listened to 'the sailors with bearded lips,' on the wharves where the ships rocked idly on the tide -- The tide! Yes, that most inexplicable wonder. . . . We had watched it come in at the Charles River Bridge, mysterious as the winds."
24. "Two Years Before the Mast" by Richard Henry Dana
"We had all set our hearts upon getting up to town before night and going ashore, but the tide was beginning to run strong against us ... and the pilot gave orders to cock-bill the anchor and overhaul the chain.... In half an hour more, we were lying snugly, with all sails furled, in Boston harbor; our long voyage ended."
Down the road: other literary neighborhoods.
