Tales of a Wayside Inn

Tales of a Wayside Inn is a collection of poems by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The book, published in 1863, depicts a group of people at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts as each tells a story in the form of a poem.

The poems in the collection are told by a group of adults in the tavern of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, 20 miles from the poet's home in Cambridge, and a favorite resort for parties from Harvard College. The narrators are friends of the author who, though they were not named, were so plainly characterized as to be easily recognizable. Among those of wider fame are Ole Bull, the violinist, and Thomas William Parsons, the poet and translator of Dante. Each of the three parts has a prelude and a finale, and there are interludes which link together the tales and introduce the narrators. The prelude for the first part begins:

"One Autumn night, in Sudbury town,
Across the meadows bare and brown,
The windows of the wayside inn
Gleamed red with fire-light..."

Longfellow undertook the large-scale project in part to combat grief over the death of his wife Fanny in 1861. While writing it, he also dealt with his personal struggles during the American Civil War, including his oldest son's illnesses and injuries while serving in the Army of the Potomac. As he wrote to a friend in England, "I have been through a great deal of trouble and anxiety... However, I have managed to get a volume of poems through the press". Longfellow originally intended to call the collection The Sudbury Tales, but was worried it sounded too similar to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. As early as October 11, 1862, however, he considered the alternative title Tales of a Wayside Inn. He wrote in his journal that day: "Write a little on the Wayside Inn. A beginning only."

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