Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, taught languages at Bowdoin and then Harvard, and became the most popular poet in America. He was also the first American to translate the whole of Dante's Divine Comedy. For most of his life he lived in Cambridge in the house that had been George Washington's headquarters in 1775 and 1776.

His poem Paul Revere's Ride, published in 1861, turned a North End silversmith into a national legend, which is why the Freedom Trail keeps meeting him. The Old Corner Bookstore was the home of the publishers who printed his work. In Newport, the old stone tower in Touro Park inspired his ballad The Skeleton in Armor, from the idea that Norsemen built it. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where you can climb Washington Tower for the view across to Boston.