Editor’s Note: This is the first of four columns in a series.

Setting as muse. It’s a concept that intrigues me personally. It’s a concept that intrigues me about the great writers and artists of the world as well. As an English professor, teacher and lover of literature, I’ve been attracted throughout my life to places I read about in stories and books. I can recall reading Mrs. Mike at age 16 and imagining a life in the Canadian wilds with my own brave husband or turning the pages of The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy in English class to fall right into rural life on the moors of southwest England.

Later as I took American and British literature courses in college and graduate school from wonderful teachers who not only made the works come alive but showed the connections between the authors’ lives and their stories, between the stories and culture and between the stories and history, I began to feel a particular love for a group of American writers from New England in the latter 19th Century. First it was my joy and terror to walk the forests and streets of a Puritan town with heroine Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. She was so fiercely brave and independent, so unlike no other woman I had run across in life or in literature. It’s no wonder then that Hawthorne became my favorite author, and I read every single line he ever wrote plus all the biographies about him as the years passed.

I fell in love with Herman Melville one day on a windswept beach at the end of Cape Cod. I sat in the sand looking out at a horizon when a great gray whale breached and then another and then another out of the dark sea. We heard their mournful song that carried in the wind. In that instant, I understood what moved Melville about whales, about the sea, about the perilous and beautiful waters. Later in life as a scholar and reader, I discovered the great friendship Melville and Hawthorne had shared, first for an intense brief period when they both lived in Lenox, Massachusetts, parting after some unexplained row, and then at a distance for the most part for the rest of their lives. Ah, I thought. I get it. These two men, these writers, are simpatico. Their characters differ, their settings and plots differ, but they are writing about the same things. They share the same vision of America, and they share the lonely job of being in this world and finding one’s way, of a perpetual seeking of meaning.

In literary study, Emerson and Thoreau are grouped as Transcendentalists; Melville fits no particular group nor does Dickinson, according to the critics, and Hawthorne classified himself as a Romanticist, meaning he could alter the truth and delve in and out of the actual world of reality as he pleased (according to his own description). But it’s my view that these writers are their own group of American Existentialists, striving to find meaning and understand one’s place in the universe through observation of the natural world.

Of course like all good American literature scholars I read Emerson and Thoreau too, from cover to cover, a dozen times, and then somewhere along the line – as a creative writing teacher, as a poet myself, I finally “got” Emily Dickinson. Her poems had been in all the anthologies; we lit majors dabbled in them, talked about them. But one day those poems came alive for me; I saw their genius. I understood their language as if before it had been a foreign one and now it was my own. Dickinson, like Hawthorne, like Melville, like Thoreau and to an extent like Emerson too, was an existential, an American existentialist, and like all these writers had a deep relationship with God as well as an argument. Each of these writers wrote to understand their purpose, their journey in this world a little better. When Dickinson writes about a bird on the walk, she offers insight into God, into Heaven, into human life on earth and our journey here.

Like Hawthorne’s dark world, our steps wander down shadowy paths; we are called on to join the group and believe in group think or we find our own lonely way, honestly and painfully. Hawthorne’s paths in the forests are always metaphorical. Dickinson too lived this way and wrote of the separate life of the artist – in it but outside of it – witnessing every tiny bird’s struggle or expressing grief like a stone in the heart. Both writers stared into the darkness, seeking an understanding of God and the universe.

In the past two decades I have journeyed many times the Berkshires to visit Melville’s farm Arrowhead out on the Oliver Wendell Holmes Road where he sat at the slanted architect’s desk in front of the northeast facing window to write that great book Moby Dick and others. I have wandered the rooms and the gardens; I have sat in the very barn where he and Nathaniel Hawthorne spent hours “smoking and talking metaphysics until dawn” a dozen times.

In Amherst, I walked the elegant grounds of Dickinson’s homestead – and a formidable homestead it is too – this expansive home high on a hill with its towering trees and its light filled rooms, slate stoned walkways beside fragrant nasturtium. I have stood in her very bedroom where she wrote most of the 1200 poems and tied them into neat bundles with ribbons then stashed them in a drawer, publishing only a few before her death. She was no sad and sorry recluse. She was, though, a brilliant soul who chose her circle of contacts carefully: “The Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door”

In Concord, 10 miles northwest of Boston, I have walked the hillside at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau are buried (as well as some other literary figures of note). Hawthorne and Thoreau lie adjacent, which seems apt as they were great friends and neighbors in life. Emerson lies by or under a great white granite rock. I’ve meandered the territory of Walden Pond and walked in each of their homes, room by shady room. I’ve travelled to Salem a number of times to see where Hawthorne was born, where he lived and where he was inspired to write The House of the Seven Gables and other tales.

In the next several articles, I’ll share my journeys to these remarkable literary places. Books have been my worlds and my friends throughout my life as these particular authors have been my mentors. To visit their homes has offered me a glimpse into their consciousness and into their muse. Such writers were buoyed by and supported by their loved ones and found insular comfort in and creative impetus from their homes. To explore place can offer us insight into creative genius.

In coming weeks, a stop at each of the writer’s houses …