Kristin Bierfelt: The North Shore Literary Trail (2007)

Kristin Bierfelt's title The North Shore Literary Trail: From Bradstreet's Andover to Hawthorne's Salem only gives the briefest indication of the contents of this fascinating book, and although it only covers a small geographical area, it contains a large number of writers who have lived in this part of Massachusetts.

Over fifty writers are mentioned in eighteen towns or villages, and a number of posts I've made this year relate to graves, statues, houses, etc, discovered solely as a result of reading this book. Not only was I led to features of which I was previously unaware concerning famous writers, but I was also informed of writers of whom I hadn't heard, such as Alonzo Lewis, Vincent Ferrini, Harriet Prescott Spofford, John Marquand, Lucy Larcom, etc.

Although the subject of the book is literature, it's fortunate that the author stretches the term to a large extent at times because I don't know where else I'd have heard of Roger Babson's eccentric boulder carvings in Dogtown near Gloucester (except perhaps in Anita Diamant's novel The Last Days of Dogtown (2005)), or the fact that the The Scaffold's song 'Lily the Pink' alludes to Lynn resident Lydia Estes Pinkham's Vegetable Compound ('Medicinal Compound' in the song): a strongly alcoholic concoction said to have worked wonders for menstrual pains and menopausal problems that sold very well during the Prohibition years.*

This book is a must for anyone traveling in north-east Massachusetts who is even remotely interested in literature.

*There is a Lydia Pinkham Memorial Clinic in Salem, built by Pinkham's daughter in 1922, almost forty years after her mother's death.

John Marquand in Newburyport, Massachusetts: Literary New England #5

In the tiny ancient Sawyer Hill Burying Ground - usually called 'the little cemetery' by locals - lies a notable author.

John Phillips Marquand, Sr, (1893-1960) grew up as his once very prosperous family was discovering how to live through the stock market crash that ruined them, and learned about poorer classes through schooling in Newburyport. The prominent statue of William Lloyd Garrison in the town too gave the message that not all are born wealthy.

Marquand gained a scholarship to Harvard, a stronghold of Ivy League privilege, where he just didn't have the name to give sufficient kudos to be accepted as one of the privileged. So he wrote satiral works about high society that were perhaps a little too subtle for all the Boston Brahmins to understand.

In 1938, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Boston Brahmin satire The Late George Apley.