What, no Baltimore?
British editors at TripAdvisor have created a list of the 10 best places for a literary vacation, and (surprise!) London beat Paris, New York and Rome for the top spot. Not only that, but U.K. cities held the next three spots. The birthplace of writers such as John Keats and John Donne and the setting for countless novels, London was described as "the home of literature we have spent so much time learning and loving", according to a Reuters news story.
Seems like a lot of 19th-century chest-puffing to me. New York only merited fifth place, and Paris seventh! Didn't even mention Baltimore, onetime-home of Poe, Fitzgerald, Stein, Sinclair, Dos Passos and Mencken. Or Hartford, where the homes of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe sit side-by-side, and Noah Webster's isn't far away.
Do you have other nominations? For TripAdvisor's Top 10, keep reading...
Here are TripAdvisor's top 10 literary destinations, with a famous author linked to the city in brackets.
1) London (Keats)
2) Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare)
3) Edinburgh (Arthur Conan Doyle)
4. Dublin (James Joyce)
5) New York (Arthur Miller)
6) Concord, Massachusetts (Louisa May Alcott)
7) Paris (Victor Hugo)
8) San Francisco (Allen Ginsberg)
9) Rome (Virgil)
10) St Petersburg (Dostoevsky)
Comments
Barth? Alice McDermott? David Simon?
Baltimore certainly deserves to be on that list. New York, pah!
Posted by: Thomas Bechtold | August 15, 2008 10:27 AM
What about Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, home of the creator of Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery?
I'm guessing Nancy would choose Columbus, OH, where RL Stime was born.
Posted by: Darlene | August 15, 2008 2:00 PM
Amherst - home of Emily Dickinson.
But yes, I agree with you about Baltimore needing to be on the list.
Posted by: Lauretta Nagel | August 15, 2008 5:42 PM