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A literary road trip through New England

Take a trip through historic New England and visit the homesteads of famous literary figures. 

3. Edith Wharton's The Mount

The Mount

A 90 minute drive east on I-90 and then north on I-91 will bring you to the bustling town of Lenox, Mass. You might want to stay in town a while, as both Tanglewood and Shakespeare & Company are located here. Alongside these main attractions, The Mount holds its own as an architectural and literary destination. Before Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for "Age of Innocence," she designed and built the Mount in 1902, using the principles discussed in her 1897 book, "The Decoration of Houses," coauthored with Ogden Codman Jr. Wharton's designs resulted in a multistory mansion with a white stucco exterior, delicate interiors, stables, gatehouse, and expansive gardens.

Wharton and her husband, Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior, lived at the Mount for nine years until they separated and sold the house in 1911.  During her time there, Wharton wrote "The House of Mirth," as well as a number of other stories and design books. Wharton liked to host extravagant parties here for her friends in high society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James. Possibly stemming from Wharton's interest in ghost stories, The Mount is rumored to be haunted; both the Foxhollow School for Girls and Shakespeare & Company occupied the Mount after Wharton and complained of unexplained noises and footsteps. Stop by and find out for yourself if these rumors are true....

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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