After a brief stint in New York, Ogden Nash returned to Baltimore in 1934 and wrote: "I could have loved New York had I not loved Balti-more." Nash grew up in Rye, New York and first came to Baltimore for love. On a trip to the Elkridge…

Mencken lived in an apartment at 704 Cathedral Street for five years with his wife, nee Sara Haardt. The third floor apartment’s east windows faced Mount Vernon Place, and the inside was decorated with a distinctly Victorian style. Marion Elizabeth…

The John H.B. Latrobe House is the only surviving site associated with the "Saturday Morning Visiter" writing contest that launched Edgar Allan Poe's literary career. On an evening in October 1833, Latrobe, along with John Pendleton…

Dashiell Hammett found inspiration for his great detective novels like "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" by working at the Pinkerton Detective Agency in what was then known as the Continental Trust Building. He experienced the seedy underbelly…

The Edgar Allan Poe statue sitting in the Gordon Plaza at University of Baltimore has a colorful past. The statue was commissioned in 1911 by the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association of Baltimore and was the last work of renowned American sculptor …

Ottmar Mergenthaler was only 18 years old when he immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1872 to work with his cousin August Hahl at his machine shop in Washington, D.C. Four years later, after Hahl moved his shop to Baltimore, inventor…

Past the brick rowhomes that have come to define Baltimore, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, established in 1854, sits on the corner of Read and Cathedral Streets. At street level, only the abrupt appearance of rubble stone from brick indicates that there…

In 1934, Carl Sandburg wrote to Sally Bruce Kinsolving, "The years go by and I don't forget ever the long evening of song with you... at your house and faces and stories and moments out of that visit to Baltimore. I'm hoping to drop in…

A novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist, Gertrude Stein is remembered as a literary innovator who fearlessly experimented with language in the early twentieth century. Today, Gertrude Stein is still renowned as a magnet for those who would…

Heralded as "the greatest writer of our time" by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, John Dos Passos spent time in and out of Baltimore from his birth in 1896 and lived here from 1950 until his death in 1970. An acclaimed biographer and novelist,…

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro was a true Baltimorean. As a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, Shapiro fed his literary ambitions with the city's rich cultural history; for instance, writing love poems at Fort McHenry where Francis…

Edgar Allan Poe, writer, poet, inventor of detective fiction, is probably most famous for his poem “The Raven.” He spent time in Baltimore off and on through his entire life. Though born in Boston, he first arrived in Baltimore on a family visit to…