Literary Connecticut incorporates beautiful drives throughout the state © Author Adventures
Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut ©Author Adventures

Literary Connecticut

Our Connecticut Author Adventures Trail divides into two geographic parts connected by a state highway: one that is inland in the area of Hartford, the state capitol, and the other that hugs the coastline.

The inland part has one of the easiest trails because three of the sites are in Hartford and the final destination is in West Hartford. The city was once a haven for book publishing, attracting some of America’s most successful authors, including the legendary Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who are included in two of the four stops.

Click any of the four links below for author and place information for the Hartford-area part of the Connecticut Author Adventures Trail. Be sure to wear comfortable walking shoes because the first one on our list is a walking tour and the next two stops are neighbors.

A. Wallace Stevens, Hartford
B. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hartford
C. Mark Twain, Hartford
D. Noah Webster, West Hartford

Our pages on the coastline locations feature the following literary stops:

E. Yale University, New Haven
F. Ann Petry, Old Saybrook
G. Eugene O’Neill, New London
H. James Merrill, Stonington

A map showing the stops in the two sections of this states’s two-part Author Adventures trail is below.

More Literary Homes

Though they may not be open to the public, more houses of Connecticut writers can be found at https://connecticutcreativeplaces.org/places/map, a project of Preservation Connecticut. They include writers of fiction, non-fiction, journalism, poetry, and children’s literature. Among the locations on their Creative Places maps are the homes of such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Juan Fuentes-Vizcarrondo, Helen Keller, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, Maurice Sendak, William Styron, James Thurber, Ilya Tolstoy, Richard Wilbur, and Thornton Wilder.