Introduction

In the mid-1980s I inherited the Boston: A City in Fiction course at Suffolk University, Beacon Hill, Boston, from retiring colleague Ed Clark, who, in response to a call for relevance, had started the course in the 1960s along with courses on African-American literature. He passed on to me his reading list for the semester: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Henry James’s The Bostonians, Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure, Dan Wakefield’s Starting Over, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy, and novels for a term paper, William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham, James Carroll’s Mortal Friends, and Daniel Smith’s A Walk in the City. He also gave me a list including five additional “Novels by Black Writers Set, Wholly or Partially, in Boston.” These books formed the basis of the course I have taught for the last twenty years and for the Annotated Bibliography I compiled in my search for new readings for class and for student papers. By December 2007, Ed’s initial two-page reading list had grown to 40 pages. Since then, thanks to a sabbatical granted to me by the College of Arts and Sciences at Suffolk University for Spring semester 2008, the bibliography has grown to over two hundred pages with the addition of thousands of entries and detailed annotations.

Originally in typescript, with my expanding use of technology, the bibliography became a word processor file and by the mid-1990s a web page. Thanks to the excellent resources provided online by WorldCat, Google Books, Amazon, Internet Archives, Wikipedia, several universities, and many professional scholars and private devotees of romances, detective and suspense novels, and comic books, this bibliography is the most powerful I can imagine, providing for entries (when available) links to the full texts (especially useful for rare 18th, 19th, and early 20th century texts held only by a few research libraries), Library of Congress subject headings, and links to Amazon and Google Books for searchable texts, back covers, reviews and summaries, and scholarly analyses. To those of us who came of age before the Internet, the easy availability of these splendid resources is a modern miracle.

With so many details in a project like this, despite constant efforts, there are undoubtedly hundreds, indeed thousands, of errors. I would be very appreciative if users of this bibliography would email me (grichman@suffolk.edu) corrections, omissions, and other suggestions, so I can update the bibliography immediately (another miracle).

II. Non-intuitive Aspects of the Bibliography

Items are listed by the century in which they are set, not by the century of publication. This means that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter appears in the 17th century section although it was published in 1850. It also means that entries for authors may not all be found together. Thus Hawthorne’s stories appear in three sections: 17th Century, 18th Century, and 19th Century.
Items vaguely set at the time of publication that were published in the first years of a century (00-03) are listed in the preceding century; such items published in 04-10 are listed in the 17th-18th Century or 18th-19th Century or 19th-20th Century or 20th-21st Century as appropriate. Items with a definite indication of the time of setting (9/11, for instance) are listed accordingly. All definite or vaguely 21st century entries published after 2003 are listed in the 20th-21st Century section. Also, works with vaguely contemporary settings by authors whose publishing lives straddle two centuries appear in separate sections.
The Bibliography includes poems, plays, and short stories as well as novels. A larger percentage of poems and short stories, I am sure, have escaped my searches than novels because they appear in magazines and collections not reached by the search engines I have used.
“Set in Boston” includes not only the political boundaries of the city, but also the closely connected communities of Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Revere, Winthrop, Brookline, Quincy, and areas loosely identified as Boston suburbs or near Boston. I have also included works that take place outside the Boston area if major characters are so closely tied to Boston and Boston values and ways that they carry Boston with them, be it upper class Bostonians in the wild west of the 19th century--
McMahon, Thomas. McKay's Bees (New York: Harper & Row, 1979) (Boston Brahmin in 1855 Kansas) (Frontier and pioneer life; Bee culture; Bee keepers; Kansas) (Amazon and Google
Books)
--or a working class South Boston policeman in London and North Africa on the staff of General Eisenhower in World War II –
Benn, James R. Billy Boyle: A World War II Mystery (New York: Soho Press, 2006) (South Boston cop on General Eisenhower's staff in London) (World War, 1939-1945--Underground
movements--Norway; Sabotage-- Norway) (Amazon and Google Books)
-----. The First Wave: A Billy Boyle Mystery (New York: Soho Press, 2007) (South Boston Irish cop on General Eisenhower's staff for 1942 North Africa landing) (World War, 1939-1945--Algeria; France--Politics and government--1940-1945) (Amazon and Google Books).
Boston is as much a state of mind as a geographical location. In general, I have tried to err on the side of inclusion, though I have omitted works set in Plymouth or Lowell or Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard which lack any real tie to Boston.

III. How to Read Entries

Here is an example of a full entry, which provides the maximum amount of data available through this Bibliography:

¹Hopkins, Pauline E. ² Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South ³(Boston: The Colored Co-operative Publishing Co., 1900; copyright 1899 ⁴[Digital

Schomburg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century]) ⁵(set in Bermuda, North Carolina, and Hopkins' home base, Boston) ⁶(African Americans; African American women;

Lynching) ⁷(Amazon and Google Books)

¹ Author’s name, last name first.

² Title, linked to online edition when available.

³ (City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication) Information usually taken from WorldCat/Google/Amazon.

⁴ [Source of online edition and year of edition if not first]

⁵ (brief characterization indicating Boston connection, especially if not obvious from title, usually based on publisher’s information included on back covers or online summaries/reviews or skimming of texts)

⁶ (Library of Congress Subject Headings taken from WorldCat or sometimes Google Books; “Fiction” always dropped from headings and frequently United States, Boston, Massachusetts, and other terms if obvious)

⁷ (links to Amazon and Google Books [both frequently provide searchable texts, even if full texts are not freely available online, and back covers, and almost always brief summaries/reviews and/or links to summaries/reviews/scholarly analyses] or other online summaries/reviews)

IV. Goal and Search Engine

The goal of this Bibliography is to be useful to readers seeking information about novels, plays, short stories, and poems set in Boston. At the moment, the only way to search the Bibliography is to use the Find feature in Edit in your browser, but I am working on providing a Google (or Google-like) search engine in the future.

Finally, to repeat, with so many details in a project like this, despite constant efforts, there are undoubtedly hundreds, indeed thousands, of errors. I would be very appreciative if users of this bibliography would email me (grichman@suffolk.edu) corrections, omissions, and other suggestions, so I can update the bibliography immediately.