Buildings & City: Sunset on The Charles, desktop wallpaper nr. 31168

The Charles River is a river in Massachusetts, USA. It travels through 22 cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts, from Hopkinton to Boston on the Atlantic Ocean.

In popular culture

The Charles River is an icon for Boston and is featured in the song "Dirty Water" by The Standells: Down by the River... Down by the banks of the River Charles

Todd Rundgren's song "Boat on the Charles" from Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren is written from the point of view of someone contemplating suicide in the Charles because of an unrequited love.

In William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the tormented Quentin character commits suicide by drowning himself in the Charles.

The 2004 (8 years ago) movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind features a prominent scene on the frozen river.

The 1994 (18 years ago) movie The River Wild opens with Meryl Streep rowing under the Watertown Bridge (Galen Street, Rt. 16) proceeding east past the Perkins School for the Blind Chapel tower and on to Boston.

In the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the protagonist, Esther, briefly considers committing suicide by jumping into the Charles off of a bridge.

In the short story "The Other" by Jorge Luis Borges a mature Borges sits on the bank of the river Charles and comes faces to face with a younger version of himself. He determines that in the past he must have had the encounter during a dream and dismissed it as fantasy, though later accepting it as real.