Boston depicts the city’s epic through the interwoven stories of four families, bringing vividly to life the passion and pageant of a town that gave birth to America.

 

Over the centuries a cast of unforgettable fictional characters share center stage with real-life heroes and rascals of Boston . . . from Puritan saints bringing their vision of a “City on a Hill” to liberty’s sons raining fire on the British below Dorchester Heights, from globe-girdling China traders to Irish ward bosses who storm the “Athens of America” street by street.

 

Boston is the hub of a panoramic saga that sweeps from the wild fens of Lincolnshire to the stygian Fleet of old London; from Cape Horn to savage Nootka Sound and the great trading houses on the Canton River; from the blighted lands of Skibbereen in County Cork to the battlefields of the Civil War; and in World War II across the perilous Atlantic to Murmansk, Russia.

 

Boston follows the generations who inhabit Shawmut peninsula:  Massachusett Indians combating terrifying Abnaki raiders at the site of the future Scollay Square . . . Quakers hoisted aloft on Boston Common’s hanging tree . . . Puritans lost in the rat pits and brothels of Mount Whoredom . . . Cudgel boys beating Redcoats black and blue . . . Irish mothers scrambling for a foothold on Jacob’s Ladder . . . Broadcloth mobs storming Tremont Temple to smash Abolitionists . . . African-Americans marching down Beacon Street off to fight for the Union . . . Brahmin “Goo-Goo’s” buttressing the ramparts of State Street . . . Catholic bullies chasing down Jews on Blue Hill Avenue . . .Yellow buses driving black and white students across a divided city. . . Workers from thirty nations coming together for the Big Dig . . .

 

The outline presents broad ideas for Boston.. It does not and cannot show character development, the finer nuances and emotions that surface as a writer moves forward.

 

Some major fictional players will surely be as depicted here: Adam Trane, Recompense West, Nixie Fly, Benjamin Steele, Farrell Lynch, Lawrence Steele, and Lily Banks-Johnson; others yet unseen wait off-stage. Many story suggestions will stand as presented, others will evolve as part of the bigger picture, and others will be supplanted by tales only my characters can reveal.

 

I offer a detailed outline primarily to show that I’ve a grasp of my subject, plus a special feel for plot lines and themes that flow through the story of Boston. This isn’t a picture of a city viewed through purple-glass windows on Beacon Hill but at ground level on cobblestone streets and bustling wharves, the lore of captains and castaways, merchant princes and servants, zealots and dissenters, visionaries, empire builders and fortune hunters. Real and fictional characters shape the destiny of old and new Boston, itself like a living being ever changing and redefining its limits.