"Meeting of the Minds: Longfellow, Hawthorne, and the Productive Influence of their Artistic Wives" with Nicholas Basbanes

Please join us for a lecture with Nicholas A. Basbanes as he discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the influence of their spouses on their work. This event is presented in conjunction with Poetic Truths: Hawthorne, Longfellow, and American Visual Culture, 1840-1880, on view February 6 though July 20, 2025 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Before They Were Famous: The Student Days of the Class of 1825 on view January 27 through June 6, 2025 at the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, Bowdoin College.

This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required. Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Bowdoin College Library.

A National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of ten works of nonfiction, including A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, a finalist in 1996 for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, and On Paper: The Everything of its 2,000-Year History, one of three finalists in 2014 for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His most recent book, Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was awarded “top honors” in nonfiction in 2020 for the Massachusetts Book Award given annually by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress, and was named a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement (London) and the Christian Science Monitor. A work-in-progress, Before Paper: Unlocking the World’s Earliest Writings, is under contract with Yale University Press. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, Humanities, Smithsonian, Civilization and The Book Collector. For the past eight years, he has been writing signed biographical sketches of the principal correspondents of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning for The Brownings’s Correspondence, a publishing initiative of Wedgestone Press funded principally since its inception in 1964 by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and now in its 31th volume. He also writes the Gently Mad column for Fine Books & Collections, a quarterly publication, and lectures widely on book-related subjects. He and his wife Constance live in Massachusetts.

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Co-hosted with: Bowdoin College Library, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives

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