A new biography of her has recently appeared: Lydia Moland’s “ Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life. She was vilified for her antislavery views but stood her ground in “ An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans” (1833). Child was a combative and articulate abolitionist, a campaigner for women’s rights and an advocate for Native Americans. Lydia Maria Child, noted for her poem “ Thanksgiving Day ,” had been born there: “Over the river, and through the wood, to grandfather’s house we go.” And, by the way, grandfather’s house still stands - handsomely restored - thanks to Tufts University. We always set off from our home in Medford - a Boston suburb, and a literary town in its own right. How did you first encounter literary Boston? I must add that, as you drive in Boston now, across the Longfellow Bridge to the Ted Williams Tunnel, it’s pretty obvious that high culture has its philistine competition. The town of Concord was nearby, with the ghosts of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Lothrop, and the iconic Walden Pond. On Sunday outings, he delved into Boston and ranged widely, his children in tow, from Herman Melville’s house in Pittsfield to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s in Salem and - chanting “ Snow-Bound ”- to John Greenleaf Whittier’s in Amesbury. The Dana-Palmer House in Cambridge was on my father’s itinerary. Dana was a great example to me as a watchful and inquisitive traveler. After enduring the dangerous voyage he recounted in “Two Years Before the Mast,” during which he witnessed a cruel flogging on shipboard, he returned to Boston to become an early human rights lawyer and abolitionist. fascinated my father, not for writing about Boston but for his example as an admirable Yankee. The nearest novel to being essentially Bostonian might be Edwin O’Connor’s “The Last Hurrah” its protagonist, Frank Skeffington, based on Boston’s flamboyant James Michael Curley, embodies Boston’s old political culture of blarney and bribery. Boston does not, like Dublin, have a “Ulysses” - few cities do. What interested him - what interests me - was not a particular book but a literary intelligence, a Yankee sensibility enshrined in many local books.

“Look, Paulie, this is the House of the Seven Gables - go on, count them!”

My father, like many passionate readers, was a literary pilgrim in his native Massachusetts, a state rich in destinations, hallowed by many of the greatest writers in the language. Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.

Sacred by Dennis Lehane