Literary Beacon Hill walking tour

Literary Beacon Hill: The 20th Century

Thursday, October 15th at 6pm

meet your guides outside Park St station

After the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott in the 19th century, another literary scene evolved on Beacon Hill in the 20th century. But, how did it compare to the Victorian “flowering of New England”? Come explore a sampling of what some later writers with Beacon Hill connections brought to American literature. Boston produced amazing poets: Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Not to mention the master of short verse David McCord. Publishing houses continued their histories through the 20th century: Beacon Press, Little Brown and Houghton Mifflin kept a powerhouse stable of authors. Great historians are also included such as Samuel Eliot Morison, David McCullough and Walter Muir Whitehill. And did you know Willa Cather’s first book was set in Boston. Her friendships with residents of Beacon Hill were among the most important in her career. And could we forget the indubitable Julia Child, who taught us all a new way to cook???

See where these literary lights lived, wrote, and worked on the Hill. Discover how their colorful, if not always happy lives and their highly personal style differed from their repressed and proper (or properly repressed) predecessors.

Tickets for this tour are $15 and are available at http://www.bostonbyfoot.org/tours/literary-beacon-hill-20th-century