Sarah Josepha Hale was one of the most successful women in writing and publishing in nineteenth-century America, and her letters and editorials were instrumental to the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Hale is connected to the old West End because one of her poems, “Mary’s Lamb,” was set to music by Lowell Mason at the Bowdoin School.

Mary Antin, a Russian Jewish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century, was a notable author who lived briefly in the tenements shared by immigrants in the old West End.