In an American literature class a couple of years ago, the required reading included a few poems in a large book with plenty of Concord writers, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne in later pages. I ventured out a bit and tried to read a small ounce of each. Older literature can be challenging, and boring, and I think a bit of an accomplishment once completed. It seems to require so much more focus, understanding and grasp. At the time, I found each writer to be extraordinary in different ways but I didn't develop a love for any of the writers or pieces of writing. Hawthorne was likely the favorite though, as The Scarlet Letter remains memorable today. That summer I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, another Concord writer. Though similarly challenging, I enjoyed this novel in its own way of showing the domestic side of war.
the Colonial Inn, Concord, Mass.
I was born in Concord, Massachusetts but until yesterday, held no recollection of the Revolutionary War/Nineteenth-Century-Literary-Destination-town-west-of-Boston. A friend and I attended a literary event in the town and found that through a mixture of morning rain, afternoon sunshine and evening fog, the town appeared so familiar to how it does in literature, with distinctly intact colonial architecture (along with a booming tourism business). I wouldn't have guessed that Concord was quite as old as it is (settled in 1635) as it seems preserved in its two main revolutions, the Concord of the 1770s and the literary one of the mid-1800s.
The event included a tour of Sleepy Hollow cemetery which appeared to stretch for miles, and in which Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Alcott are buried. Pencils and pens adorned the graves.
Buried beside siblings with similar single-name headstones, the grave of Henry David Thoreau.
The grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Concord, Mass.
Concord, Mass.
with Katie, Lexington, Mass.
Bedford, Mass.
Bedford, Mass.
Bedford, Mass.
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