Though it only measures about a half-mile across, Walden Pond occupies an outsized place in literary history. It's where Henry David Thoreau hunkered down between 1845 and 1847, and the landscape would ultimately inspire his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Thoreau’s legacy is still plainly visible: Next to the parking lot, you’ll find a statue of him and a replica of his humble cabin.

Over the years, a number of literary luminaries roamed the halls of this clapboard house near the banks of Massachusetts’s Concord River. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, etched into the window panes that can still be seen today.

Just a couple steps away from the Boston Common, Brattle Book Shop has been peddling used books since 1825. The pleasantly jumbled store has 250,000 books, postcards, maps, and prints that span genres and decades. Outside, a mural of famous authors gazes down at shoppers sifting through sale racks.

This family of nine—a mother and her eight offspring, Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack—has lived in the Boston Public Garden for more than 30 years. They're bronze statues of the “Mallard” family, from the classic 1941 children’s book Make Way for Ducklings.

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe’s birth, Boston renamed a nearby plaza after the author. A statue shows Poe striding down the street, jacket flapping. He's flanked by a corvid companion—and, of course, a heap of books.

The Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, and a bunch of other gangly, goofy characters hang out in a park in Springfield. Each member of the bronze brigade was made by sculptor Lark Grey Diamond-Cates, as a tribute to her stepfather, Ted Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—in his hometown.

By the time the eccentric author Edward Gorey died in 2000, the floors of his home were heavy with books, flea market finds, and 75 unpublished manuscripts. These many curios are on display in his former home, which is now a museum dedicated to Gorey's life and work.

Louisa May Alcott grew up sharing a colonial house with her three sisters. It was affectionately known as the Orchard House, because of its dozens trees heavy with apples. Today, the handsome house is a museum that includes art by Louisa’s sister May—the inspiration for Little Women's Amy—and learn about the young ladies who once called it home.

Mourners come to Edson Cemetery to pay tribute to (or pour one out for) Jack Kerouac, a founding father of the Beat Generation, often leaving cigarettes and joints or skewering poems to the ground with pens.

Along the bank of the narrow Sawmill River, there’s a deliciously stuffed bookshop. Inside a gristmill that dates to 1842, the store retains some of its centuries-old charm—think scuffed floors and generous windows, whose light pours into the aisles.