For two weeks, I told myself, “This is a class…” but I never felt it. I was walking where Thoreau and Emerson walked on the shores of Walden Pond, I breathed in the cold ocean air as Melville once did, and I traced the curves and angles of Hawthorne’s own handwriting with my index finger. How much closer can someone get to these literary geniuses of nineteenth-century America? Of course, they’ve long been dead and buried—we visited their graves and meditated on how even mortals can become legends that linger in our consciousness today.

In each house, I gazed at the paintings, the wooden planks of the floor, even the exposed bricks in the wall trying to imagine that the mythological figures we study in literature class once looked at these very same things. I studied the dinnerware in Twain’s Steamboat House as if expecting to see lip imprints around the rims of the glasses. When we were told to hold onto the banister while going down the stairs in the Old Manse, I gripped the wood, picturing Hawthorne or Emerson descending that very same flight some bright morning a couple of centuries ago. Ultimately, I was trying to make the names I see constantly in class more real. I like to think those authors left those houses, their clothing, and their possessions behind as if to say “I was here.”

Then again, what better legacy did these persons leave in their wake than their words? Some were recognized in their day while others experienced fame long after they were gone, but either way their work bears testament to their existences more than anything else. The toil of their hands and imagination—what we now call our American literary tradition—is addressed “From one soul to another.” Without this trip, I don’t believe I could have fully understood this concept. Sure, I would read these novels and poems for a grade, study my notes in hopes that I would remember them well into my old age, but seeing the country those authors roamed has made all the difference. Now I read Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and the rest of them differently. I feel closer to the literature than I did before. I am convinced that the New England authors did not intend their writings to be solely the subject of study and criticism but, rather, lived as well. They wanted us to breathe the air of their fictional worlds and make them just as real for ourselves as they were for them.

I left New England with several heavy souvenir books and some other little articles that made it through airport security checkpoints in one piece (Yeah, I was surprised too!), but greater than that is the pride I feel in being a part of the continuing American literary tradition through the study and examination of both the lives and works of our famous authors.