This book is a detailed account of the visits of twenty-one famous writers—four British and seventeen American—who visited Philadelphia. Burke focuses on the literary history of Philadelphia. Contents: Preface; Passing Through; Thomas Moore; Washington Irving; Ralph Waldo Emerson; (Amos) Bronson Alcott; James Fenimore Cooper; Edgar Allan Poe; John Greenleaf Whittier; Charles Dickens; James Russell Lowell; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; William Makepeace Thackeray; Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain); Henry David Thoreau; Emily Dickinson; Walt Whitman; William Dean Howells; Oscar Wilde; Edith Wharton; Theodore Dreiser; William Carlos Williams; Henry James.