New Englands Literary Traditions

From Nathanial Hawthorne to Stephen King, New England has produced many of America’s literary greats.

New England was the birthplace of Transcendentalism, one of America’s earliest movements in literature and philosophy. This golden age of American literature was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose poetry, essays and liberal humanism attracted followers to the town of Concord in Massachusetts. These included Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May, author of the classic Little Women, Henry Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote the Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables recounting deeply New England themes of moral rectitude. Concord became a hub of thought and today former homes such as Alcott’s Orchard House and the Old Manse and the Emerson Memorial House are museums dedicated to the lives and works of these writers.

Other New England writers of the 19th century include Emily Dickenson, who lived a secluded existence in the town of Amherst in the Berkshires, where there is also a literary museum. But one of New England’s most renowned and widely read books Moby Dick by Herman Melville, depicting the New England whaling industry centred on ports such as New Bedford and Nantucket.

Writers such as Henry James were drawn to parts of New England to base their stories such as The Bostonians (1886), Mark Twain after settling in Hartford Connecticut wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Robert Frost settled in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and wrote there and Jack Kerouac wrote about his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. While in theatre Eugene O’Neill was associated with the Provincetown Players and set a number of his plays in New England.

In recent times the scruples of New England morality and the region’s colourful scenery were depicted in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, while Stephen King a native of Maine continues to write best-selling chillers from his Victorian Gothic house in Bangor using surrounding locations as inspiration for Pet Semetary, the Shining, Salem’s Lot and IT.