Menu
Raymond Mungo is a writer whose books should be more familiar than they are to readers in the Merrimack Valley. He has lived in Southern California for many years, but he was born in Lawrence and graduated from Boston University, where he gained national attention as the politically radical editor…
Read More »Henry and John Thoreau took themselves on a two-week boat trip up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers at the end of the summer in 1839. Henry wrote a book about their adventure, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849; he paid for it to be published…
Read More »Jean LeBlanc is an Assistant Professor of English and Developmental Studies at Sussex County Community College in northwestern New Jersey. She was raised in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and still identifies as a New Englander with pride (especially, as she writes, “being so close to various New York sports teams that shall…
Read More »But if Thoreau’s first book is flawed, it is a flawed masterpiece. Indeed, as critics have begun to recognize, even if Walden had not been written, A Week would nonetheless stand as one of the seminal works of the American Renaissance. —Linck C. Johnson, Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of…
Read More »“… Just as he describes it, the Concord narrows dramatically and shallows out over a ‘yellow pebbly bottom’ as it approaches the falls in Billerica, where the Thoreaus went off on the Middlesex Canal and where Kaz and I were to rendezvous with my wife, Yolanda Whitman, in her Odyssey.…
Read More »