Before I visited Salem, I had a vague idea of what had happened there in 1692-3, but the full story is more complex than I had realized. My understanding was largely formed by Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which is set during the Witch Trials. But in Salem I was reminded that while The Crucible is a great play, it’s as much about the McCarthyism of the 1950s as it is about Salem. Miller used the broad outlines of the... Read more
When last we met here at The Holy Rover, Emerson, Thoreau, and the rest of the gang were resting quietly in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. We’ll leave them there in peace while we head eastward 30 miles to Salem, an Atlantic seacoast town where the ghosts don’t rest so quietly. If you remember, there’s a link between the two towns in Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter and descendent of one of the judges in the Salem Witch... Read more
We end our Holy Rover tour of Concord (finally!) at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the resting place of the authors whose lives and careers were so intertwined during the mid-nineteenth century. It’s one of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve ever seen (and I’m somewhat a connoisseur of graveyards, so that’s saying something). One can read a great deal into their grave markers, if one is of a contemplative frame of mind as one strolls beneath the oaks and elms. Emerson’s grave... Read more
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal... Read more
“Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden Read more
Thoreau died virtually unknown to the larger world, but in the years since then his reputation and influence have grown ever larger. His essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (written after he spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes because of the country’s support for slavery and the Mexican War) had a profound influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular. But it is Walden that speaks most clearly across the years... Read more
Thoreau was 27 years old when he built his hut on the shore of Walden Pond, which is a small body of water less than two miles long on the outskirts of Concord. The building of it must have been an intoxicating experience for him, this man who had so often relied on charity but who now was independent at last (though it must be admitted that he was living rent-free on borrowed land). Thoreau spent his days writing in... Read more
Let’s suppose you take a time-machine trip back to 1840s Concord to meet some of the people I’ve been writing about on The Holy Rover. You’d likely be impressed by Emerson (a tall, handsome man with a kindly manner) and by Louisa May Alcott’s quick wit and intelligence. Brooding Hawthorne wouldn’t talk much to you, but you could probably sense there was a great mind at work behind his shyness. And then there’s Henry David Thoreau, who would probably strike... Read more
I live in Iowa City, Iowa, home to the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, the nation’s oldest and most respected creative writing program. Over the years I’ve known a number of workshop graduates, and I’ve frequently been amused by their black humor as they talk about tragedies in their lives. In the literary world, having something awful happen to you or your family is a big plus, for it provides a rich vein of writing material. The more unusual and tragic,... Read more
I mentioned last week that Louisa May Alcott seems like an old friend, particularly in her incarnation as the fictional Jo March of Little Women. If you’ve read that book you won’t be surprised to learn that Louisa was the rebel of her family, a tomboy who loved climbing trees and tramping through the woods. She was the second of four daughters, a tall and handsome girl with thick, chestnut-colored hair. Growing up in Boston and in Concord, Louisa was educated... Read more
Holy Rover
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In