As I conduct my personal survey of Maine lobster rolls, the colorful Fall leaves, lighthouses, and beautiful coastline offer a distraction. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s birthplace and childhood home, a brick house not far from the water in Portland,Maine, is now a museum. Although his bedroom window had a view of the sea, inspiration for many of his poems, modern buildings now block that vista.

Of course, I found the bookstore named for the famous poet.

Both Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne studied at Bowdoin College, my next stop.