Robert Frost

Watertown, MA

This 1929 resident hotel, designed by architect R. M. Blackall, briefly housed one of the 20th century's great novelists. Vladimir Nabokov—a Russian émigré who had fled revolution and then Nazi Europe—lived here in 1956, in the flush of Lolita's explosive fame and just after finishing Pnin. From nearby Cambridge he was also deep in his monumental scholarly translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, a project that consumed years of his life.

Cambridge, MA

John Winthrop (1714–1779), a Harvard professor and Fellow of the Royal Society, lived on this site from 1746 until his death. One of colonial America's foremost scientists, he taught mathematics and natural philosophy, observed comets and planetary transits, and helped lay the foundations of American scientific inquiry. The marker honors a scholar celebrated in his day as the greatest American mathematician and philosopher of his time.

Cambridge, MA

In 1630 the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony chose this spot on the Charles River to be their capital, and the next year Thomas Dudley led settlers to build the town they called New Town. Six years later the colony voted to plant its new college here, and in 1638 the settlement was renamed Cambridge in honor of the English university where many Puritan founders had studied.

Boston, MA

This memorial honors Francis Parkman (1823–1893), one of nineteenth-century America's greatest historians and the author of the classic frontier narrative "The Oregon Trail" and the sweeping series "France and England in North America." A Bostonian who wrote through years of failing eyesight and ill health, Parkman helped define how Americans understood their continent's colonial and frontier past. He was also a noted horticulturist who taught at Harvard.