Where Are They Buried? (48 page)

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Doug’s slate gray stone is easy-to-find, located on the left, just a hundred feet past the entrance.

JANUARY 2, 1920 – APRIL 6, 1992

Isaac Asimov was an amazingly prolific writer who churned out 477 published titles on a wide range of subjects. Though best known for elevating the science-fiction genre from pulp-magazine adventure to a higher intellectual level dealing with sociology and
history, he was also prone to explore whatever happened to be his muse du jour and wrote critically acclaimed books about physics, biology, and astronomy, as well as Roman, Greek, and American history. There were textbooks and primers, a collection of limericks, a smattering of mysteries, a guide to Shakespeare, works about the Bible, and even children’s books. And to top all of that in case you’re not yet suitably impressed, Isaac contributed some 1,600 columns, essays, and short stories to magazines.

Explaining how he became a compulsive writer in the first volume of his autobiography,
In Memory Yet Green
, he wrote that his father owned a candy store which was open for a nineteen-hour stretch every day of the week. If young Isaac was even a few minutes late to the store after rushing from school, his father yelled at him for being a folyack, which is a Yiddish slang term for slacker. More than 50 years later, Isaac remained committed to his own fourteen-hour-day, seven-day-a-week routine and wrote: “I am still showing my father I’m not a folyack.” Indeed, books and writing were Isaac’s only interests; never once in his life did he swim or even ride a bicycle.

Teaching himself to read before he was five, Isaac skipped several grades, received his high-school diploma at fifteen and sold his first story when he was eighteen. Three years later in 1941, he sold a story called
Nightfall
to Astounding Science Fiction, then the top magazine in the field. Isaac got paid a penny a word for the story. “So for a 12,000-word story I expected $120. I got a check for $150 and thought they’d made a mistake,” he recalled. “But when I called to tell them, they said the story had seemed so good to him they gave me a bonus of one-quarter cent a word.” Almost 30 years after
Nightfall
was published, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it the best science-fiction short story ever written.

After earning a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University in 1948, Isaac accepted an offer from Boston University to teach biochemistry though he “didn’t feel impelled to tell them that I’d never studied biochemistry,” he recalled during an interview. “But three years later I was writing a textbook on the subject, and it was then I realized the only thing I really wanted to be was a writer.”

Isaac’s science-fiction won many accolades and his Foundation Trilogy, consisting of
Foundation
,
Foundation and Empire
, and
Second Foundation
, earned him a Hugo Award for Best All-Time Science-Fiction Series. In
I, Robot
he invented the Three Laws of Robotics governing the relation of robots to their human masters: robots may not injure a human or, by inaction, allow a human to be harmed; robots must obey humans’ orders unless doing so conflicts with the first law; robots must protect their own
existence unless doing so conflicts with the first two laws. Among his nonfiction works,
Asimov’s New Guide to Science
is considered one of the best books about science for the layman though Isaac himself made no great claims for his work. “I make no effort to write poetically or in a high literary style,” he said. “I never read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Kafka and I have no doubt that it shows in my prose.”

After contracting AIDS from a blood transfusion during a coronary bypass operation, Isaac died of the affliction at 72. His will stipulating there be “no permanent memorial of my existence,” he was cremated and his ashes scattered.

Most Americans have heard of Concord, Massachusetts, and are aware of its historical significance during the Revolutionary War. Depending on one’s interest level, anywhere from a few hours to a few days can be spent enjoying the area’s historical landmarks and, if it’s your inclination, be sure to include a visit to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. The cemetery holds numerous Revolutionary-era heroes and, at the area of the cemetery known as Author’s Ridge, the four authors profiled below rest peacefully beside one another.

NOVEMBER 29, 1832 – MARCH 6, 1888

Louisa Mae Alcott began writing a series of popular melodramatic short stories under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard in the late 1840s, but the turning point of her career came with the publication of
Little Women
in 1869. Though the work now seems somewhat dated and moralizing,
Little Women
and its four sequels document 1800s New England life with touching accuracy. They were instrumental in changing the focus of juvenile literature to include more sensitive and realistic portrayals of young adults, they have undergone several film adaptations, and adolescents continue to flock to the works today.

After spending the last decades of her life working for women’s suffrage, Louisa Mae died at 55 of the long-term effects of mercury in her system. At the time, mercury was a common treatment for the effects of typhoid fever, to which she’d been exposed as a child.

MAY 25, 1803 – APRIL 27, 1882

After graduating from Harvard in 1825, poet Ralph Waldo Emerson entered the ministry. He soon became an unwilling preacher, however, and, unable in good conscience to administer sacraments to his deceased nineteen-year-old wife, he resigned his pastorate in 1831. Soon he had settled in Concord, and in 1836 Emerson’s ideas were collected in a volume of essays entitled
Nature
. The work prompted him to be considered, along with his contemporary Henry David Thoreau, as a chief proponent of the new Transcendentalist philosophy and literature movement, a reaction against scientific rationalism. The central tenet was that everything in our world is a microcosm of the universe, “an infinitude of the private man.” Transcendentalists tended to disregard external authority and to rely instead on direct experience. Emerson’s motto, “Trust thyself,” became the movement’s watchword.

For the remainder of his life, through a series of essays, poems, and lectures, Emerson preached these recurring themes, encouraging his audience to trust instinct and use their potential talents for authentic self-discovery to create a new American culture.

At 78, Emerson died of pneumonia.

JULY 4, 1804 – MAY 19, 1864

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne settled in Concord and, though he fraternized with the Transcendentalist crowd, he didn’t share in their intellectual idealism. Instead, Nathaniel concentrated on the Puritan origins of American history, and on creating a distinctive literary style in two of the first truly great works of American literature,
The Scarlet Letter
in 1850 and its companion,
The House of the Seven Gables
, in the year following.

When Franklin Pierce became President in 1853, he appointed his old college buddy to an ambassadorship in England, and there Nathaniel wrote his last major work,
The Marble Faun
. In 1864 the two friends reunited for a pleasure trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where Nathaniel quietly expired in his sleep at 59.

JULY 12, 1817 – MAY 6, 1862

Although he lived in relative obscurity, the rugged individualist Henry David Thoreau has come to be considered one of the central figures of American thought. He celebrated Independence Day 1845 on his own terms by beginning a two-year, self-imposed exile at a hut near Walden Pond, a period he later described in his most famous work,
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
. The book is an unfulfilled plea for simplicity and deliberateness in everyday life and continues to haunt those who are cognizant of the distance between their ideals and our materially driven culture.

The use of the word “exile,” by the way, is not wholly accurate. In actuality, Thoreau made frequent trips to Concord, welcomed occasional visitors, and entertained dinner guests. During this time, he even went to jail for refusing on principle to pay a poll tax and that one-night imprisonment was the catalyst for one of his most important political essays, “Civil Disobedience.” In it, Thoreau exalts the law of conscience over civil law and implores citizens to nonviolent protest: “Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” he wrote.

Finally, Thoreau is embraced by conservationists for his essay
Walking
, in which he celebrates the joys of the amble and pleads for conservation of the world’s wild places. Published a month after his death, the work is recognized as one of the pioneering documents in the conservation and national park movement in America.

After suffering a prolonged case of tuberculosis, Thoreau died at 44.

If you journey to Concord, you may also want to see Thoreau’s house—the yellow one at 255 Main St. It’s now a private home, but I’m sure the residents are used to gawkers. Thoreau lived in its attic during the last third of his life and, in the parlor just to the right of the front door, he died.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Boston, follow Route 2 west toward Concord. Once you get close, follow the signs to the center of town. From there, take Route 62 east, and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a short distance ahead on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Once in the cemetery, look for the stone signs that direct you to the parking area for Author’s Ridge. A walk up a small knoll delivers you to the ridge, and there you’ll find the graves of Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, each within a short distance of the others.

The Beats were a group of carefree writers who emerged out of the strait-laced, post-World War II era to shake up the literary scene forever. Their refreshingly original approach advanced a reckless stance against the establishment, and their styles challenged the very notion of what constituted “literature,” uprooting entrenched norms.

The word “beat” was itself a common localism for society’s underbelly and was never meant to be elevating at all. It meant just the opposite, in fact—to be exhausted by existence. The word acquired historical resonance when Jack Kerouac, who would become the most cherished of the Beat writers, remarked to John Clellon Holmes, “I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.” Appropriating this conversation, Holmes brought the word into the mainstream in a November 1952 article, “This is the Beat Generation,” in which he described it as “a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.”

Writers soon began to invest the viewpoint of the defeated with a mystical perspective. Allen Ginsberg wrote, “the point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul.” Through its literature, the Beat Generation outlived its historical
moment, it survived its notoriety and the ensuing media blitz, and its works still inspire passionate ideals.

MARCH 12, 1922 – OCTOBER 21, 1969

If there’s a father of the Beat generation, his name is certainly Jack Kerouac. He came out of a broken-down New England mill town during the Depression and, as the star back on his high school team, won a football scholarship to Columbia University, from which he hoped to bring new prosperity to his blue-collar family. But things went wrong at Columbia and Jack dropped out. After being discharged from the Navy for having “an indifferent character,” he ended up sailing with the merchant marines in 1942, and, when Jack wasn’t sailing, he hung around New York with a new crowd of friends: a libertine Columbia student, Allen Ginsberg; a brilliantly bizarre literary inspiration, William S. Burroughs; and Neal Cassady, a joyful street cowboy from Denver.

Jack was already an author, but in 1951 he created something different. During a twenty-day binge, Jack wrote a “stream of consciousness” manuscript on a continuous, 128-foot scroll of tracing paper that became his
On The Road
masterpiece. With a sharp edge of social comment, it’s an autobiographical story of two friends, Sal Paradise (Jack) and Dean Moriarty (Neal), who spontaneously and exuberantly reject middle-class conventions and wander through America in search of respite from mundane conformity. Jack, who also incorporated his sometime-mentor Allen into the book as Carlo Marx, spent years trying to get the work published, carrying it around in a rucksack wherever he went, until finally it was released in 1957. The work was an immediate success, but was mostly panned by literary critics, who objected to its fast and mad style. (Truman Capote famously complained, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”) But it’s now a basic text for disenchanted youths whose lives have become claustrophobic and oppressive. More important, the book was a catalyst for the unfettered Beat lifestyle.