The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath — Plath was a Smith College student in Northampton in the early 1950s, and the novel draws on her breakdown and hospitalisation during that period. The Smith campus, the fictional "Amazon" hotel (based on the Barbizon in New York), and the institutional psychiatry of the era are central to the book. Essential reading before walking the Smith campus.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou — Angelou is not directly associated with Northampton, but Smith College has been central to American women's intellectual life for 150 years, and Angelou is among its most celebrated honorary degree recipients. Her memoir captures the world of ambitious Black women in mid-20th-century America.
The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams — Adams grew up in a Massachusetts world not unlike this one, and his autobiography grapples with the transition from New England's Calvinist certainties to the modern industrial age. Northampton's old Protestant architecture and its colonial-era village greens carry something of that world still.