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Edgar Allen Poe Lowell, Massachusetts, late May to early June 1849 Daguerreotype On this day – January 19, 1809 – American short-story writer, poet, critic and editor Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe poularized the short-story and his tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective story. Among…
Read More »Happy Birthday, Mr. Poe By David Daniel On this day, sir, in 1809, you were born in Boston, a child of actors. Before long, your father split to chase his own dreams and your mother continued acting to support herself and you—performing the roles of young women—Ophelia, Juliet … young…
Read More »In Lowell literary history, the back-of-the-envelope version used to highlight Lucy Larcom, the women writers of the Lowell Offering magazine, and Jack Kerouac, along with legendary visits by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and H. D. Thoreau. That envelope has more names now. In our time, many…
Read More »Edgar Allen Poe Lowell, Massachusetts, late May to early June 1849 Daguerreotype On this day – October 7, 1849 – American author, poet, editor and literary critic – Boston-born Edgar Allan Poe died at age 40 in Baltimore. His tales include: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” –…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein is a short, dense and intense meditation on what it means to be an outsider and a survivor. The first-person narrator speaks directly to the reader spinning the tale of how, as a…
Read More »Christine P. O’Connor is a writer and attorney in Lowell. She has an essay in the literary anthology Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell, which is forthcoming in April. This is her first appearance on the Howe blog. The essay surfaced on her Facebook page a few days ago, after…
Read More »This past Saturday, Sean Thibodeau, the Coordinator of Community Planning at the Pollard Memorial Library, led a Lowell Walk on Literary Lowell. Sean told some great stories about writers who were from Lowell, visited Lowell, or wrote about Lowell. Throughout the tour, participants asked for a list of the works…
Read More »This past Saturday, eighty people participated in the Literary Lowell edition of Lowell Walks. Tour guide Sean Thibodeau, the Coordinator of Community Programming at the Pollard Memorial Library, prepared a handout that listed many books about Lowell or written by people from Lowell, and added the names of other notable…
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Two weeks ago saw three different million dollar plus real estate deals in Lowell (Markley Group/Prince Spaghetti; Lowell Community Charter Public School/Mill No. 5; UTEC/Central, Prescott & Warren Streets). This week there was one deal of that scale: an apartment building at the corner of Stevens Street and Princeton Boulevard…
Read More »Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac. Grove Atlantic (2023), 120 pages, $16 (softcover) Reviewed by David Daniel Seventy years after it started, the Beat Movement continues to hold considerable cultural fascination. Nurtured by its origin-story of Columbia University friendships followed by the famed Six Gallery Reading and the San Francisco…
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