William Cullen Bryant
For a rustic country locale between the great early American cities of Springfield and Albany, the Berkshires punches way above her weight! William Cullen Bryant was born in Cummington where the boy-genius composed the earliest American poems to merit publication in the eternal anthology, Thanatopsis and To a Waterfowl. Visit his boyhood home.
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ancestor of Edie and Kyra, is the first American woman to publish successful novels. Her father Theodore sued his friend Col. John Ashley and won the freedom of Mumbet in 1781, to make Mumbet the first person freed from slavery in the infant Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She lived and worked for the Sedgwicks for the rest of her life and is buried in the first circle of the famous Sedgwick pie.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne spent a productive eighteen months in Lenox, 1850-51, where he wrote The House of Seven Gables and A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls, and also coined the word Tanglewood, an apt description of the woody thicket that lay between the cottage and Lake Mahkeenac below. It is a charming coincidence that his unhappy sojourn here was because he lost a patronage job just in time to make the acquaintance of Herman Melville, who also lucked into such employment.
Herman Melville
The relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, which began during a sudden thunderstorm on Monument Mountain in August, 1850 is among the most important in American letters. When it occurred, neither had read the other, but, within weeks of huddling together in a shallow cave, Hawthorne was an avid fan, and Melville wrote Hawthorne and His Mosses, as powerful and eloquent a review of any book by anyone anywhere. After his close reading of Hawthorne’s Mosses from and Old Manse, Melville went back to work on a manuscript, which he dedicated to his new friend upon publication of Moby-Dick in 1851.
Edith Wharton
If Ms. Sedgwick is the first American woman to succeed as a novelist, then Edith Wharton became the first to be truly celebrated, when her novel, The Age of Innocence, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1921. The precocious child of a rich cosmopolitan family named Jones, (supposedly the family society had to keep up with!) Edith began making up stories at age 5-6 when the family lived in Europe, attempted a novel at 11, and was paid handsomely when, at 15, she published a translation of a German poem. With husband Teddy Wharton, she bought 100+ acres in Lenox and built The Mount, residing there until 1911. With her marriage headed for divorce, The Mount was sold and in 1911, Ms. Wharton moved to France, where she died in 1937, and was buried at Versailles, a hero of the French for her work with the wounded of WWl.
