Boston: Voices and Visions

"New England was founded consciously, and in no fit of absence of mind," observed historian Samuel Eliot Morison on the establishment of the Bay Colony in 1630. Since then, Boston has been shaped and sustained by observation, imagination, and interpretation, yielding a compelling literary record. In this wide-ranging anthology, Shaun O'Connell offers a generous sampling of those who have recorded, revised, and redefined the vision of Boston, including preachers, politicians, poets, novelists, essayists, and diarists.

From John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" sermon, delivered aboard the Arbella before the first settlers landed, to Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," a poem delivered in Boston's Public Garden in 1960, writers have continued to invoke the high purposes for which the city was founded, sometimes in praise, but often by calling attention to the city's failures to fulfill its promises. In the twenty-first century some writers continue to celebrate or to castigate the city, while others look back to Boston's origins to reassess its founders and renew its covenant of high purpose.

This is an interpretive anthology羅one that includes commentary as well as writings. Rather than present a random array of writers who happen to have been Greater Bostonians, O'Connell focuses on those authors who possessed a commitment to the sense of place, those who addressed Boston not only as a geographical, social, and political entity but as an image, idea, and site of symbolic values.

"This excellent anthology brings together a broad, diverse, and well-chosen collection of primary readings, with substantial introductory essays for each of the six sections. New voices such as Michael Patrick MacDonald, Roland Merullo, and Eve LaPlante join familiar Boston literary luminaries. O'Connell's introductions are informed, well written, and effectively frame the varied voices and selections."-Joseph A. Comforti, author of Imaging New England

Shaun O'Connell is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.