Explore Boston · Part One
Read It, Watch It
Boston on page and screen: the books and films worth packing.
Boston has been a setting since America started writing novels, and filmmakers love its accents, alleys, and past. Every pick below is set in or around Boston, and most put you on a street you can still walk.
Books
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
Hester Prynne wears her scarlet A through 1640s Puritan Boston, from the prison door to the marketplace scaffold. Still the sharpest portrait of the town’s founding temperament. ›
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
The March sisters’ Concord is Alcott’s own: she wrote the book at Orchard House on Lexington Road, which you can tour, and set it there too. The town is a day trip and the house is the reason to make it. ›
The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells, 1885)
A self-made paint millionaire builds on the water side of Beacon Street and collides with old money. Howells finished it while living on Beacon Street himself. ›
The Bostonians (Henry James, 1886)
Olive Chancellor, a Beacon Hill reformer, and Basil Ransom, a conservative Mississippian, fight over Verena Tarrant, a young feminist orator, through Boston parlors and Harvard Yard. James’s novel about his own country, and the sharpest thing ever written about Beacon Hill earnestness. Merchant Ivory filmed it in 1984 with Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve.
Make Way for Ducklings (Robert McCloskey, 1941)
Two mallards raise eight ducklings by the Charles, then march them to the Public Garden as a policeman holds traffic. Caldecott Medal, 1942; the bronzes arrived in 1987. ›
Johnny Tremain (Esther Forbes, 1943)
An apprentice silversmith with a ruined hand carries messages for the Sons of Liberty, from the Tea Party to Lexington. The 1944 Newbery winner is the best Freedom Trail primer for kids. ›
The Last Hurrah (Edwin O’Connor, 1956)
An aging Irish American mayor, modeled on James Michael Curley, fights one last campaign in an unnamed city every reader takes for Boston.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George V. Higgins, 1970)
A small-time hood facing prison weighs turning informer, told almost entirely in dialogue by a Boston federal prosecutor. Robert Mitchum starred in the 1973 film, shot around town.
The Godwulf Manuscript (Robert B. Parker, 1973)
The first Spenser novel: a Boston private eye who cooks, quotes poetry and keeps an office in Back Bay, with a partner named Hawk he met boxing at the old Boston Arena. Parker wrote about one a year until his death in January 2010; Ace Atkins and then Mike Lupica have carried the series on since, and the city is the one character that never changes. Spenser: For Hire ran on ABC from 1985 to 1988.
Common Ground (J. Anthony Lukas, 1985)
Three families, one Black, one Irish American, one Yankee, live through Boston’s 1970s school-busing crisis. It won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize and remains essential on the modern city. ›
Paul Revere’s Ride (David Hackett Fischer, 1994)
A historian’s page-turner on April 18 and 19, 1775, with Revere as a network’s organizer, not a lone rider. Read it, then walk from his house to Old North Church. ›
Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace, 1996)
More than a thousand pages, set mostly at a tennis academy and a halfway house in Enfield, which is Brighton with the names changed. Demanding, very funny, and worth it. ›
Black Mass (Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, 2000)
Two Globe reporters trace how the FBI’s Boston office protected Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang for two decades while agent John Connolly ran him as an informant. Scott Cooper’s 2015 film cast Johnny Depp as Bulger; the book is colder and better.
Mystic River (Dennis Lehane, 2001)
A murdered girl pulls three boyhood friends back together in a fictional blue-collar neighborhood Lehane built from Dorchester. The best of his Boston novels, and the one that made Clint Eastwood’s film possible.
Dark Tide (Stephen Puleo, 2003)
January 15, 1919: a molasses tank on Commercial Street bursts and floods the North End, killing 21. A gripping disaster story and a portrait of immigrant Boston. ›
Films and TV
The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison, 1968)
Steve McQueen is a bored Boston millionaire who stages a bank heist for sport; Faye Dunaway is the insurance investigator on his trail. Beacon Hill steals its scenes. ›
The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982)
Paul Newman is Frank Galvin, a drinking, washed-up Boston lawyer who takes a malpractice case against a Catholic hospital to trial instead of pocketing the settlement. David Mamet’s script, from Barry Reed’s novel, is a courtroom film about one man deciding to be good.
Cheers (NBC, 1982 to 1993)
Eleven seasons of regulars and barstool philosophy. The exterior was the Bull & Finch Pub on Beacon Street, renamed Cheers in 2002 and still pouring by the Public Garden. ›
Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997)
A South Boston kid mopping floors at MIT turns out to be a math genius. Oscars went to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s script and Robin Williams, whose Public Garden bench draws pilgrims. ›
Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003)
Lehane’s novel, above, on screen: Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars, and Eastwood shot it in the city rather than on a lot.
Fever Pitch (Bobby and Peter Farrelly, 2005)
A Red Sox obsessive’s romance runs on the team’s schedule; the ending was rewritten when the 2004 club won its first World Series since 1918. Fenway plays itself. ›
The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)
An undercover cop inside the Irish mob and the mob’s mole inside the State Police hunt each other across Boston. Scorsese’s remake of Infernal Affairs won Best Picture.
Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, 2007)
Affleck’s directing debut sends two private investigators after a missing four-year-old in Dorchester. From Dennis Lehane’s novel, it is unsparing about the neighborhood’s hard choices. ›
The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010)
Charlestown bank robbers line up one last job, at Fenway Park, in Affleck’s adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves. Watch it before walking the Navy Yard. ›
Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)
The Boston Globe’s investigative team exposes clergy sexual abuse and its cover-up in the Archdiocese of Boston. Best Picture; the real reporting won the Globe a 2003 Pulitzer.