Vladimir Nabokov

Boston, MA

By the time Robert Frost lived at 88 Mount Vernon Street from 1938 to 1941, he was a national institution, an unofficial poet laureate and four-time Pulitzer winner. During these Beacon Hill years he taught poetry at Harvard and continued to shape American letters. The address marks a late, honored chapter in a long literary life.

Cambridge, MA

David Joseph Brodette served in Company F of the 168th Infantry Regiment, part of the famed 42nd "Rainbow" Division of the American Expeditionary Forces sent to fight in France during World War I. He was killed in action on October 29, 1918 — barely two weeks before the Armistice silenced the guns on November 11 — at just 23 years old. Cambridge answered his loss the way countless American towns did after the Great War: by giving a piece of the community itself, a memorial circle, his name, so that a neighbor who never came home would remain part of the landscape he left behind.

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

Between 1845 and 1852, a potato blight ravaged Ireland's staple crop and touched off the Great Famine, or An Gorta Mór, in which roughly a million people died and a million more emigrated to escape starvation and disease. Vast numbers of those refugees landed in Boston, and Cambridge became home to generations of Irish American families whose labor and faith reshaped the region. This memorial gathers that grief into a single vow, insisting that hunger amid abundance is a moral failure the living are bound to prevent.