Description

LITERARY GLOUCESTER, A WALKING TOUR, began as a project of the Gloucester 400^th+ in 2023, and it proved so popular it was picked up by the Gloucester Writers Center in 2024 to keep it going. Now approaching its third year, Phil Storey continues to add rich details to the walks, to be held every second and fourth Saturday morning from May through September 2025, culminating in a Sails & Trails tour on the 27th.

Gloucester is known as an endless source of fish tales, but it is also home to a vast literary landscape. T.S. Eliot, often regarded as the most important poet writing in English in the 20th century, summered in Gloucester throughout his childhood. He bought a composition notebook at Proctor Brothers downtown, in which he wrote his early poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft set a number of his weird tales in Gloucester such as ?The Shadow Over Innsmouth? featuring the American Legion building on the tour. One of the best-selling American author of the 19th century, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, summered in Gloucester most of her life. Sadly, she is largely forgotten now, as women artists so often are, but in her time she was so popular she attracted other creatives to the area, including Longfellow, whom she brought to Norman?s Woe, a rocky outcropping which inspired ?The Wreck of the Hesperus.? Judith Sargent Murray, Kipling, Charles Olson, and many others are ready to be re-discovered on a free two-hour walking tour of Gloucester with noted raconteur Phil Storey.

Philip Storey is a preeminent historian
of the local. A noted raconteur
and story-teller, he developed this
engaging tour over the course of the
Gloucester 400+ and is excited to
continue hosting it in partnership with
the Gloucester Writers Center.