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If you have a love of literature, chances are there is a tour, event, or museum devoted to the enduring legacies of American authors. Whether you are part of a social group, book club, school group, or you are an interested book-lover, there are plenty of literature tours in the United States to enjoy. Take a road-trip across the country and match 50 novels to all 50 states or focus on the homes, haunts, and museums of America's finest writers!
Boston is known as the literary birthplace of American Romanticism, American Realism, and Transcendentalism among other movements. It's also the base city of many famous authors who called this city home at one point or another. Take a guided tour highlighting the homes and haunts of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and London natives Henry James and Charles Dickens. Likewise, New Orleans has been known to be a popular refuge for writers like Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Kate Chopin, and playwright Tennessee Williams. Check out the many themed events around the city to celebrate these famous wordsmiths.
Other popular destinations with literary significance include Baltimore's Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum and his original gravesite, the Emily Dickinson House and Museum tour in Amherst, Massachusetts, and a tour of F. Scott Fitzgerald's childhood home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Visit Ernest Hemingway's home and museum in Key West, Florida, Mark Twain's boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, or Robert Frost's Farm in Derry, New Hampshire.
Stop by famous bookstores like Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and Manhattan’s Three Lives & Co. or the pubs where literary greats penned their masterpieces. See the desk where Thoreau wrote Walden and the apartment where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind. Experience the past and step into the lives of your favorite authors with an American literary tour on your next student trip!
