No city in America can match the literary heritage of Boston. Just as the city has a Freedom Trail connecting its Revolutionary sites, it also has a Literary Trail connecting the homes, workplaces, and final resting places of its great writers. This revised second edition of Susan Wilson's expert guidebook brings the story up to the minute.
Spanning nearly four centuries of literary greatness, from Anne Hutchinson and Cotton Mather to Sylvia Plath and John Updike, The Literary Trail of Greater Boston covers more than just Boston proper, as the title suggests. Winding its way through Cambridge and finding its way to Concord, Wilson's work pays special tribute to literary heroes of the nineteenth century, including Alcott, Thoreau, Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, while guiding readers to sites related to Kahlil Gibran, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, E. E. Cummings, and a remarkable number of other modern writers.
This unusual guidebook also features lively selections from the writers' own works along with short essays on writers past by well-known contemporary writers. These include Julia Child on Fannie Farmer, Gish Jen on Lousia May Alcott, David McCullough on Francis Parkman, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on W. E. B. DuBois. Novelist Robert B. Parker says, "The Literary Trail of Greater Boston is part tour guide, part literary history, altogether charming."
Adds William Martin, author of Back Bay and Harvard Yard, "If you're visiting for the first time, let this great little guidebook show you the treasures of Boston's literary past. If you've lived here all your life, let it remind you of the richness around you."
Originally published in 2000 by Houghton Mifflin, this new 2005 edition—enlarged, updated, and beautifully redesigned by Commonwealth Editions, with a larger font and page size—includes sites, stories, and facts not included in the first edition. Over two dozen site managers, historians, librarians, teachers and other experts were contacted in making updates, corrections, and additions to the original text. Like the original book, representation of women and minorities is appropriately matter-of-fact—both well and lesser-known women, in fact, make up more than a third of all the entries. Susan Wilson is a longtime board member of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. More information on her work, books, photography, lectures, multimedia projects, and tours are available at www.susanwilsonphoto.com.

Pictured here with Mayor Menino are students from the College of Public and Community Service (CPCS) who are enrolled in Professor Shoshanna Ehrlich’s applied history capstone seminar. Supported by funding from CPCS and the UMB Honors Program, the students will be travelling to Virginia at the end of April to present their research at the National Undergraduate Research Conference. They also hope to present at the statewide conference, which will be held here at UMB in April.

Seminar students are exploring the lives of eight women who were active in the Abolitionist and/or the Women’s Suffrage Movements in Boston. Some of the women, such as the Grimke sisters, are quite well known. Others, such as Maria Stewart, who historians credit as being the first African-American woman to author a political manifesto, have received little public attention. Of central importance, is uncovering each woman’s link with and contribution to the intricate network of reform activity in Boston, as well as her geographical connections to the city.

To situate the lives of these reformers in a historical context, we are also exploring Boston’s rich history as a center of reform activity. As we are learning, it was a hub of both abolitionist and women’s rights activism. Not only were important reform groups born in this city, Boston was also a hotbed of intellectual fervor, and contributed to the anti-slavery movement through the publication of influential slave narratives, including Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. Bravely addressing the sexual exploitation of female slaves, this book was intended to arouse the sympathy of Northern women, and inspire them to reach out to their enslaved sisters in the South.

Once our research is complete, we intend to write a booklet that will be distributed by the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail to teachers, historians, and visitors to Boston. By educating people about the city’s vibrant past, we hope to encourage individuals to stand up and make a difference in their communities today.