By the mid-nineteenth century, Boston had earned the nickname “The Athens of America,” as an important center for literature and as home to many of America’s greatest writers. It was the launch pad of American Romanticism, Transcendentalism, the Fireside Poets, and American Realism.
Join Boston By Foot for a walking tour that highlights the homes and haunts of such prominent Victorians as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Individually, they were writers and poets without peer. Collectively, they made Boston the epicenter of American Letters.
Meet your guide at the corner of Washington and School Streets, in front of the Irish Famine Memorial.
Admission: Adults $15; Children 6-12 $10; Save $2 per ticket when you buy online; Free for Boston By Foot Members.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.