Berkshires, by the Book

SEDGWICK, Mass. — I set out recently for the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, a two-hour drive from Boston, to celebrate the start of another year of teaching. As a professor of English, I had long wanted to visit the homes of two great American writers, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, both of whom had lived for a time in the Berkshires.

While I was aware that many other prominent 19th and 20th century writers had Berkshires connections--among them William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Catharine Maria Sedgwick--I was delighted to find in planning my two-day literary tour that I could pay homage to them, as well as to Melville and Wharton. I visited Bryant's home in Cummington, open for viewing on summer and fall weekends, and a replica of Hawthorne's Little Red House on the grounds of Tanglewood, site of the renowned summer music festival. It was in the Little Red House that Hawthorne wrote "The House of the Seven Gables."

Any present-day visitor can see how the unspoiled beauty of the Berkshires' dense forests and mighty hills could have nurtured the literary imaginations of local writers and beckoned to those from beyond its boundaries. To visit these writers' homes is to glimpse the landscapes that inspired and informed some of America's literary treasures.

First, I visited the Stockbridge grave of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), an important writer in her day, if now relatively obscure. Contemporary critics ranked her alongside James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving as one of the premier writers of the time. Although she wrote several novels and collections of stories, most of which are out of print, her best-known work is still available, a 1827 novel titled "Hope Leslie," a book that generated some controversy because of its criticism of colonial-era racism and sympathetic portrayal of native Americans.

The Sedgwicks of Stockbridge were a prominent family, and their grave site in the Main Street Cemetery, in the center of town, is referred to locally as the Sedgwick pie because of the circular arrangement of its headstones. I was touched by the simplicity of Catharine Maria's gravestone, a lovely ivy-laced cross rising from a stone base inscribed with only her name and the dates of her life.

From Stockbridge it was a short drive north to Lenox, where in 1850 and '51 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) resided in a small clapboard house belonging to the Tappan family. The Tappan estate is now home to the Tanglewood summer music festival, which attracts about 300,000 visitors every year.