Book Review: Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape

In Imagining Boston, author Shaun O'Connell provides a survey of the best known authors who came from Boston, spent time in Boston, or lived anywhere in the general vicinity while they did their writing. Which means that the connection to Boston in the writing is sometimes rather tangential. Then again, books by Bostonians about Boston would make a quick read. The usual suspects of the first half of the 19th Century are here - Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, etc. If the book stopped there, it would have covered material already mined over many times. Luckily, we get authors of 20th Century cultural history references, like Martin Green, Dennis P. Ryan and Gary Willis, and autobiography from Theodore H. While and Charles Angoff. And new to me, the edited diaries of the lunatic Arthur C. Inman. For that reference alone, this book was worth reading.


Imagining Boston