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…
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…
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” –…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Lots of time for reading when you’re waiting for broken bones to heal! Fiction to follow. After the Last Border:Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America by Jessica Goudeau tells the often-checkered history of American treatment of refugees,…
Some items left over from last week . . . Lowell Cinema viewing experience At least some of the theaters at the Lowell Cinema (near Industrial Ave and Cross Point) have been reconfigured. The rows of lightly-padded stadium style seats have been replaced by widely-spaced, thickly padded recliners. Because there…
Julie Mofford, a former staffer at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, who currently lives in midcoast Maine where she writes and works as a museum and historical society consultant, shares her memories of the 1950s . . . “The Un-Fabulous Fifties or How I Became Beat” by Julie Mofford Years…