Literary Vacations—The Berkshires

Visit the Historic Homes of Wharton, Melville, and Bryant

Nov 5, 2009

Western Massachusetts is a beautiful place to spend a long weekend. Stay in a B&B, hike or ski the mountains, and tour the homes of famous American writers.

New England offers many semi-rural vacation spots only a short drive from New York City and Boston, and the Berkshire Mountains, in Massachusetts, are home to some of the best. Spectacular countryside views have long made Western Massachusetts an ideal home for writers seeking an alternative to crowded and distracting city lives.

Visit the homes of Melville, Wharton, and Bryant

Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick and hiked with Nathaniel Hawthorne near his Pittsfield home, and Edith Wharton and chose Lenox as the site of her elaborate country estate. Poet William Cullen Bryant added on to his birth home in Cummington, turning it from a basic New England farmhouse into an elegant Victorian cottage. These writer’s homes have been preserved and are opened to the public for guided tours.

The Edith Wharton Estate

Two hours west of Boston and three hours north of New York City, The Edith Wharton Estate, called “The Mount” is located at Route 7 and Plunkett Street in Lenox, Mass. The extensive and imposing home and gardens were designed by Wharton in 1902 following the principles outlined in her 1897 book, “The Decoration of Houses,” and provide an architectural history lesson as well as a literary one. Lectures are held at The Mount on Monday evenings, and ghost tours are held Friday evenings. Personal and group tours of the grounds and the home are available by reservation throughout the week May through December.

Tour Melville’s “Arrowhead”

Herman Melville lived in the Berkshires for 13 years, until financial strains drove him back the New York City and a customs inspector job. It was at Arrowhead, his Western Mass. home in Pittsfield, just down the road from Lenox, that Melville wrote Moby Dick. Arrowhead was close to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home, and during their overlapping years in the country, the two writers became close friends. Melville’s modest wooden house was home to the writer’s large family (Melville’s wife, four children, mother, and two aunts)—but no one was allowed in the upstairs study, where Melville worked daily at his writing desk. Tours are available daily, Memorial Day to Labor Day.

The William Cullen Bryant Homestead

Bryant grew up in a simple farmhouse were his preserved historic homestead now stands. Bryant wrote poems inspired by his bucolic childhood home, and summered there during many of his 50 years as publisher of the New York Evening Post. The site is now classified as a National Historic Landmark, and includes extensive grounds for hiking and exploring—much of the property has been untouched for the past 150 years, which makes it an ideal setting to re-imagine the past. Tours are available year round, inquire about advanced reservations.

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