First published in 1989, Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery by Blanche M. G. Linden, Ph.D. (1946 – 2014) tells the story of the founding and early decades of Mount Auburn Cemetery.  The book originally started as a doctoral dissertation for Harvard University Ph.D candidate Linden who focused on the intellectual and cultural origins for Picturesque design that Mount Auburn was founded on.  Linden then shaped and expanded the dissertation into a book that studies the philosophical and practical reasons why the Cemetery was created and gives a detailed description of the growth of Mount Auburn.  It won the Historic Preservation Book Award and the American Society of Landscape Architects Merit Award.

In 2007 a redesigned and updated paperback version of Silent City was republished by the American Society of Landscape Architects.