Bennington, Vermont, is the kind of New England town that begs for a poet to describe it. Its streets are lined with mature trees and stately Victorian homes; the Green Mountains stand like looming sentinels at its eastern border. It comes ablaze in the fall, blooms in the summer, and spends each winter blanketed in snow.
And it does have a reputation as a place where writers encounter the muse. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was inspired by the author’s time in Bennington—as was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” in which the residents of a small New England town gather annually on the green to stone one unlucky person to death.
