Why this small town in the northeast US has been home to so many authors, from Emerson to Alcott
- Concord, Massachusetts, has a vast literary past, having been home to talents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne
Apart from their love of the written word, American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), and Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) have something else in common.
All of them made their home in Concord, a small town in Massachusetts, in the United States.
Established by English settlers in 1635 as Musketaquid, an Algonquian word meaning “grassy plain”, the town was renamed Concord later that year, suggesting peaceful agreements with Native Americans.
For many years, Concord, 32km northwest of Boston, was synonymous primarily with the American Revolution. British soldiers entered the town on April 19, 1775, to destroy arms and ammunition after a battle at nearby Lexington, but Paul Revere, a hero of the revolution, had forewarned residents.
The first bullet fired by the revolutionaries during the ensuing skirmish was immortalised decades later by Emerson in the Concord Hymn as “the shot heard around the world”, marking the beginning of the American War of Independence.
More than a century later, Concord, the home of Emerson, poet and leading exponent of New England transcendentalism, would become a centre of culture.
