Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in the Berkshires less than two years, 1850-51, but few sojourns by any artist anywhere have been as fruitful and memorable as his.
Not only did he name the wild, never-cultivated land around the house he inhabited with his wife and children Tanglewood, but his residency impelled Herman Melville to swap his own New York home for his brother’s farm on Holmes Road in Pittsfield, where he would finish Moby-Dick, and then dedicate it “in token of my admiration…” for Hawthorne’s genius!
Tanglewood Tales
From the introduction to Tanglewood Tales: It was idle, however, to imagine that an airy guest from Monument Mountain, Bald Summit, and old Graylock, shaggy with primeval forests, could see anything to admire in my poor little hillside, with its growth of frail and insect-eaten locust trees. Eustace very frankly called the view from my hill top tame; and so, no doubt, it was, after rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire, and especially the northern parts of the county, with which his college residence had made him familiar.
Read Tanglewood Tales, and most of Nathaniel hawthorne free online, compliments of Project Gutenberg.
Photo credit:
By Mathew Benjamin Brady – Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11558996