The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at 215 East Biddle Street

Orphaned at age 17, Gertrude Stein (b. 1874, d. 1946) moved to Baltimore in 1892 to live with relatives. Within the straitlaced German-Jewish community, she found unconventional role models like her uncle, photographer David Bachrach, and Dr. Claribel Cone, the epitome of an independent woman.

Stein lived in this house while attending Johns Hopkins medical school. A failure as a med student, she instead moved to Paris and became one of the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century. She championed modernism, boldly experimenting with language in her literary works. Her famous salon brought together writers and artists who profoundly changed art and literature, from Picasso to Fitzgerald. She lived openly as a lesbian at a time when homosexuality was taboo.

Stein wrote caustically about Baltimore yet acknowledged her formative experience here. In the end, she claimed Baltimore as her hometown, noting, “after all everybody has to come from somewhere.”

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at 14 East Chase Street

Transcript: Emily Post (b. 1873, d. 1960) was born in this house into a family of wealth and privilege. At a time when women of her class were expected to remain at home attending to social and domestic duties, she became a shrewd businesswoman who pioneered a field that flourishes to this day: the etiquette expert.

Her career began out of necessity: Post divorced her philandering husband in 1905 and turned to writing to support her two children. She published mostly travel and fiction before her book Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage came out in 1922. It was a huge bestseller. She parlayed her newfound fame into newspaper columns, radio programs, and books on homemaking.

Post’s name became synonymous with “proper” behavior. Though often considered old-fashioned or elitist, much of her advice revolved around civility, consideration, and respect. Her book has remained in print, with new editions modernized by her descendants.

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at Belvedere Hotel, 1 East Chase Street

Transcript: The Belvedere opened in 1903 and instantly became Baltimore’s most prestigious hotel. Ten U.S. Presidents, one Queen of Rumania, and writers from Mark Twain to Clare Boothe Luce stayed here. F. Scott Fitzgerald held his daughter’s sweet 16 party here. Novelist Henry James—author of such classics as Turn of the Screw, Washington Square, and Daisy Miller—visited in 1905 while researching his travel book, The American Scene. Mount Vernon’s houses, he wrote, “suggested rows of quiet old ladies seated, with their toes tucked up on uniform footstools.”

Visit the ground-floor Owl Bar, whose enigmatic owls have watched over patrons for generations. Fitzgerald drank here with his friend H.L. Mencken, though Mencken began to have second thoughts, noting in 1934 that Fitzgerald “is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance.” Photos of the Belvedere’s famous guests line the walls leading to the bar.

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 811 Cathedral Street

In the 1920s and 1930s, Emmanuel Episcopal hosted the Maryland Poetry Society, which brought cutting-edge poets to culturally conservative Baltimore. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who embodied the liberated woman of the time, gave frequent readings here. Poet and socialist Carl Sandburg spoke of poetry’s new embrace of the “brutal onrush of modern life” and chided the audience for being “terribly respectable.” In 1933, T.S. Eliot himself lectured on modernism in poetry, advising the audience that while modern poems might seem obscure, it was “largely a matter of getting used to it.”

By the time writer and filmmaker John Waters was hanging out in Mount Vernon in the 1960s, the neighborhood was long past “respectable.” The celebrated “Pope of Trash” premiered his early films here, including Mondo Trasho, his first full-length feature, in 1969.

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at Baltimore School for the Arts, 712 Cathedral Street

Transcript: Rap icon Tupac Shakur (b. 1971, d. 1996) grew up steeped in poetry and revolutionary politics thanks to his mother. His family moved to Baltimore when he was 13 and struggled with poverty—when their electricity was cut off, he would read Malcolm X by streetlight.

While in high school at Baltimore School for the Arts, Shakur explored creative expression with close friends like future actress Jada Pinkett. He shone in theater, music, even ballet. Though his family moved away before his senior year, his time here was transformative. As he put it, “I started to feel like I really wanted to be an artist.”

Shakur would achieve global fame with powerful songs about racial inequality, female empowerment, addiction, and poverty. In his brief, turbulent life, he was unable to avoid the fate he depicted in a prize-winning rap he wrote as a Baltimore teen. He called it, “Us Killing Us Equals Genocide.”

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at 704 Cathedral Street

Transcript: He’s no longer a household name, but Henry Louis Mencken (b. 1880, d. 1956) was the nation’s most influential journalist and cultural critic in the first half of the 20th century. The lifelong Baltimorean lived in an apartment here during his five-year marriage to Sara Haardt, who died in 1935.

Known as “The Sage of Baltimore,” the cigar-chomping newspaperman wrote thousands of columns for the Baltimore Sun. As an editor of cutting-edge national magazines, Mencken befriended and promoted Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other authors he felt brought a welcome realism to American writing. Though he was susceptible to the prejudices of his day, his magazine American Mercury was the first edited by whites to publish Black writers like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes.

Mencken was renowned for his cynical witticisms. Here's one: "It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at Stafford Hotel, 718 Washington Place

Transcript: Fitzgerald (b. 1896, d. 1940) is the second “Francis Scott” on this tour. Proud to be named in honor of Key, a distant relative, the celebrated author had many local connections. He lived here at the Stafford Hotel in 1936 during a five-year stay in Baltimore while his wife Zelda underwent treatment for mental illness.

It was Fitzgerald who labeled the 1920s the “Jazz Age,” and he himself embodied the era he called “an age of art and an age of excess,” writing novels like This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby while living the party life. It all crashed in the 1930s with Zelda’s illness and his own alcoholism. During his Baltimore years, he explored the underside of his lifestyle in works like Tender is the Night and “The Crack-Up.”

Despite his downward spiral, Fitzgerald loved Baltimore, writing, “I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.”

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at Mount Vernon United Methodist Church, 10 East Mount Vernon Place

Transcript: Before this magnificent church was built in 1872, a mansion occupied the site. In this home died the author of America’s most famous poem, one memorized by virtually everyone if only so they can sing it at sporting events from junior high volleyball to the Super Bowl.

Francis Scott Key (b. 1779, d. 1843), author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” passed away while visiting his daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth and Charles Howard, the mansion’s occupants. Key, a prominent attorney and amateur poet, had witnessed the 1814 British bombardment of Fort McHenry and penned his historic verses after seeing the fort’s gigantic American flag still flying the following morning.

Key was a slaveholder, giving particular irony to his poem’s most memorable line. Indeed, abolitionists suggested that “Land of the Free and Home of the Oppressed” would be more accurate. Despite this and other controversies, “The Star-Spangled Banner” became the National Anthem in 1931.

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at George Peabody Library, 17 East Mount Vernon Place

Transcript: Novelist John Dos Passos (b. 1896, d. 1970) lived in Baltimore from 1952 until his death. He could often be found here, in the Peabody Library reading room, researching and writing in an upper floor alcove. He picked a good spot: the library, which is open to the public, is widely considered the city’s most spectacular interior space.

Little remembered today, Dos Passos was once recognized as a quintessential Jazz Age writer, on a par with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His sweeping three-volume novel U.S.A., published in the 1930s, captured America’s dynamic society with its groundbreaking mix of fiction, biography, newspaper clippings, songs, and more. His innovative techniques influenced generations of authors. Jean-Paul Sartre called him “the greatest writer of our time.”

Dos Passos greatly appreciated his adopted city, its color, tempo, and variety. Baltimore was, he wrote, a city that “imbues the inhabitants with a certain dignity.”

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/

Located at Corner of Charles and Hamilton Streets (Looking down East Hamilton)

Transcript: Looking down East Hamilton Street, you will see the only remaining structures from a thriving Black neighborhood destroyed in the 1910s to make way for Preston Gardens. It was in this neighborhood that John Murphy (b. 1840, d. 1922), a formerly enslaved man, chose to locate the Afro-American newspaper in 1899. Murphy had acquired the paper two years earlier, and its new home at 307 St. Paul Street, surrounded by the Black professional class, reflected ambitious plans. He soon developed the Afro into the most widely circulated Black newspaper on the East Coast and a leading voice for Black advancement. It moved to northwest Baltimore in the early 20th century.

After Murphy’s death, his son Carl brought the newspaper to national prominence. Poet Langston Hughes, artist Romare Bearden, and legendary sportswriter Sam Lacy (a key figure in integrating professional sports) appeared in its pages. The Afro remains the nation’s oldest family-owned Black newspaper.