Walks & Trails
The Boston Literary Walk
About 2.3 miles one way · About 50 minutes of walking; 2.5 to 3 hours with stops, longer with museum visits
Access Beacon Hill, between stops 5 and 9, is steep, with uneven brick sidewalks and some cobbles; everything else is flat and paved. Step-free alternative: from the Athenaeum follow Beacon Street downhill along the Common to the Public Garden and rejoin at stop 10.
Hours and prices Each ticketed stop below carries its hours and admission; the full table is Sights at a Glance.
For much of the 19th century American letters ran through Boston, and the addresses are still here. Ticknor and Fields published Hawthorne, Thoreau and Longfellow from a little brick shop on Washington Street, The Atlantic was planned over a long dinner at the Parker House in 1857, and the Saturday Club met monthly in the same hotel, just up School Street from the publishers. The city built the country’s first large free municipal library, while its private Athenaeum still fills five floors on Beacon Street. Even Edgar Allan Poe, who was born here, credited his first book to a Bostonian.
This route was drawn for this chapter; it is not the official Literary Trail of Greater Boston. That 20-mile Boston, Cambridge and Concord circuit, laid out by the Boston History Collaborative with a 2000 guidebook by Susan Wilson, was largely toured by coach, and its website has long since lapsed. The 12 stops here run from Washington Street over Beacon Hill and through the Public Garden to Copley Square, and three of them, the Old South Meeting House, the Old Corner Bookstore and the Athenaeum, are also on The Women’s Heritage Trail.
Know before you go
- Start at the Old South Meeting House, a short walk from Downtown Crossing (Orange and Red Lines) or State (Orange and Blue Lines). Finish at the Central Library, across Boylston Street from Copley (Green Line). Park Street (Red and Green) near the Athenaeum and Boylston (Green) near the Poe statue make easy places to split the walk.
- Exterior only: the Pinckney Street, Louisburg Square and Willow Street houses are private homes, and the green at the center of Louisburg Square is a private gated park. The Old Corner Bookstore building now holds a Chipotle, so its history is on the outside.
- Paid admission applies at the Old South Meeting House, the Museum of African American History, the Prescott House (tours on a few scheduled dates a season, $12) and the Boston Athenaeum; prices and hours print under each stop. King’s Chapel Burying Ground, the Public Garden, the Poe statue and the Boston Public Library are free, and the Parker House lobby is open to passersby.
- Eat on Charles Street, between stops 8 and 9: The Paramount does breakfast and lunch at the counter and dinner at the tables, and the street’s other rooms are in Beacon Hill.
- For one more stop, the Boston Women’s Memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, between Fairfield and Gloucester streets, puts Phillis Wheatley in bronze beside Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone, about 0.3 mile from the library.
Walks & Trails · The map
The Boston Literary Walk
Map key
- 1Old South Meeting House
- 2Old Corner Bookstore
- 3Omni Parker House
- 4King’s Chapel Burying Ground
- 5Boston Athenaeum
- 6African Meeting House and Museum of African American History
- 7Pinckney Street: the Alcott and Hawthorne Houses
- 8Louisburg Square and Willow Street
- 9William Hickling Prescott House
- 10Make Way for Ducklings, Public Garden
- 11Poe Returning to Boston
- 12Boston Public Library, Central Library
Stop by stop
Old South Meeting House
310 Washington St at Milk St
Hours Daily from 10 a.m., closing at 5 or 6 p.m. by season (6 p.m. in Oct, 5 p.m. Nov–Dec); closed Thanksgiving, Dec 24–25 and Jan 1; occasional event closures · Admission $18 adults; $16 seniors 65+; $10 ages 6–17; 5 and under free; one ticket also covers the Old State House and includes the Ruckus! show
Built in 1729, this brick meeting house is where Phillis Wheatley was baptized on August 18, 1771. She was about 18, enslaved by the Wheatley family, and she joined Old South’s congregation rather than the church her enslavers attended. Two years later, unable to find a colonial publisher, she saw Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral printed in London: in 1773 she became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. For a bookshop to match the trail, walk a few blocks south on Washington Street to the Brattle Book Shop at 9 West Street, selling used books since 1825 on three floors and from carts in the lot next door, Monday to Saturday 9 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
In this book: Old South Meeting House
Old Corner Bookstore
283 Washington St at School St
Hours Exterior only · Admission Free
Put up in 1718, this corner building is where New England’s authors carried their manuscripts. William Ticknor and James T. Fields published Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Thoreau’s Walden from here and ran The Atlantic out of the building from 1859. Fields also told a young Louisa May Alcott to stick to teaching. Historic Boston rescued it in 1960; a Chipotle fills the ground floor today, so read the building from across Washington Street.
In this book: Old Corner Bookstore
Omni Parker House
60 School St at Tremont St · Free
Harvey Parker opened his hotel in 1855, and its dining rooms became home to the Saturday Club, a monthly table that included Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes and Louis Agassiz. Club members organized The Atlantic in 1857 over dinner here, with Lowell as its first editor. Charles Dickens took rooms in 1867 and 1868 on his last American visit. The kitchen gave the country the Parker House roll and the Boston cream pie, both still served at Parker’s Restaurant off the lobby, and the hotel’s own lore puts Ho Chi Minh in its pastry kitchen around 1912 and Malcolm X bussing its tables in the early 1940s. Today’s building dates from 1927.
King’s Chapel Burying Ground
Tremont St at School St, beside King’s Chapel
Hours Chapel Mon–Sat 10 a.m.–5 p.m. in Oct, reduced hours in winter; Sun Morning Prayer 11 a.m.; burying ground daily about 9 a.m.–4 p.m. · Admission Chapel $5; guided tours $10–$15 adults (entry included); burying ground free
In use since 1630, this is the oldest burying ground in Boston proper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne bookended The Scarlet Letter with it. The novel opens by tracing the ground back to Isaac Johnson’s lot, and its last page digs Hester Prynne’s grave here beside an older, sunken one, the two sharing a single slate. Governor John Winthrop is a real resident. From 1809 to 1822, the Athenaeum occupied a house next door.
In this book: King’s Chapel and King’s Chapel Burying Ground
Boston Athenaeum
10½ Beacon St
Hours Mon–Thu 9 a.m.–8 p.m., Fri–Sat 9 a.m.–5 p.m. · Admission First floor $11; ages 13 and under $5
Bostonians who published The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review founded the Athenaeum in 1807, and after several moves it settled into Edward Clarke Cabot’s building here in 1849. Two more floors went on in 1913 and 1914, and the galleried reading rooms now look over the Granary Burying Ground. Emerson, Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott all read here. It is still a membership library: non-members can pay to see the first floor, book a docent tour, or buy a one-day membership for the whole building, and research appointments in the special collections are free with advance booking.
In this book: Boston Athenaeum
African Meeting House and Museum of African American History
46 Joy St (museum entrance); meeting house at 8 Smith Court
Hours Thu–Sun 10 a.m.–4 p.m. · Admission $15 adults (incl. Meeting House talk)
Up Joy Street on Smith Court stands the African Meeting House of 1806, the last stop of The Black Heritage Trail, which tells its story. The literary angle: William Lloyd Garrison, whose Liberator printed Maria W. Stewart’s 1831 essay, founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society here in 1832, and Stewart and Frederick Douglass both spoke from its pulpit. The Museum of African American History runs the site and gives an annual Stone Book Award for writing on Black history.
In this book: Museum of African American History
Pinckney Street: the Alcott and Hawthorne Houses
20 Pinckney St (and 54 Pinckney St) · Private: view from outside
Two writers lived on this street more than a decade apart. In 1839 Nathaniel Hawthorne took a Custom House post and a room in lawyer George Hillard’s house at No. 54, where his evenings went to love letters for Sophia Peabody, his future wife. From 1852 to 1855 the Alcotts lived at No. 20; here Louisa, about 20, got her first story, The Rival Painters, into print, then her first book, Flower Fables (1854). Both are private homes; admire them from the sidewalk.
Louisburg Square and Willow Street
10 Louisburg Square (and 9 Willow St)
Hours Exterior only (private)
Louisa came back up the hill in style. In the 1880s, with Little Women behind her, she settled her family at No. 10, a Greek Revival house on this square, and cared for her father, Bronson, after his stroke. He died in March 1888, and Louisa died two days later. Leave by Willow Street: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes rented at No. 9 from 1958 to 1959, resolved to spend the year writing.
In this book: Louisburg Square
William Hickling Prescott House
55 Beacon St
Hours Tours on scheduled dates only · Admission $12 adults; 12 and under free
Left virtually blind by a college injury, the historian William Hickling Prescott lived here from 1845 until his death in 1859, writing his Conquest of Peru and Philip II in a third-floor study he added. On an 1852 visit, William Makepeace Thackeray noticed the crossed swords in his library, belonging to Prescott’s grandfather and his wife’s grandfather, who fought on opposite sides at Bunker Hill, and wrote them into the opening of The Virginians.
In this book: William Hickling Prescott House
Make Way for Ducklings, Public Garden
Boston Public Garden, inside the Beacon St and Charles St corner
Hours 6:30 a.m.–11 p.m. · Admission Free
Robert McCloskey’s 1941 picture book marches Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings across Mount Vernon, Charles and Beacon streets into the Public Garden, close to the route you just walked, and it won the 1942 Caldecott Medal. Nancy Schön’s bronze family landed on these cobblestones in 1987 for the Garden’s 150th anniversary: Mrs. Mallard leading Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack. Climbing is encouraged.
In this book: Boston Public Garden
Poe Returning to Boston
Edgar Allan Poe Square, Boylston St at Charles St South · Free
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in January 1809, near this corner, and liked to mock the city’s literary establishment as the Frogpondians. Stefanie Rocknak’s life-size bronze, unveiled in 2014, shows him just off the train and striding toward his birthplace, a raven taking flight and pages spilling from his open trunk.
Boston Public Library, Central Library
700 Boylston St, Copley Square
Hours Mon–Thu 9 a.m.–8 p.m., Fri–Sat 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Sun 11 a.m.–5 p.m. · Admission Free
The BPL moved into Charles Follen McKim’s palazzo in 1895; the building itself is read on the Architecture & Art Walk. Here, read the facade before you go in: 537 names of writers and thinkers are carved into it, along with Free to All, the principal benefactor Joshua Bates insisted on. Bates Hall, the barrel-vaulted reading room named for him, runs the length of the building.
In this book: Boston Public Library (Central Library, Copley)
Beyond Boston
- Cambridge: Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters, 105 Brattle St, was the poet’s family home and, from July 1775 to April 1776, George Washington’s headquarters; free ranger tours run late May to early November, dates at nps.gov/long. Mount Auburn Cemetery, on the Cambridge-Watertown line, was dedicated in 1831 as the country’s first garden cemetery, and Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Julia Ward Howe are buried there. Both are in Cambridge.
- Concord, about 40 minutes by Commuter Rail: Orchard House, 399 Lexington Rd, was the Alcott family home from 1858 to 1877, where Louisa wrote and set Little Women in 1868; Walden Pond State Reservation marks the site of the cabin Henry David Thoreau lived in from 1845 to 1847 with granite posts, and a replica of the house stands on the reservation grounds; and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery’s Authors’ Ridge holds Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau near one another. The day is planned in Day Trips.