More than 100 homes of famous writers are open to the public in America that span centuries and genres. They are dedicated to honoring and interpreting the lives and works of our greatest authors and poets. Going to the homes where well-known writers created their most famous works gives one a sense of how these writers lived.
The Emily Dickinson Museum has two houses on the property- the Dickinson Homestead where Emily lived for most of her life, and the Evergreens which belonged to Emily’s brother and sister-in-law. Emily was born in the Homestead and lived there from 1855 to 1886. The Emily Dickinson Museum has been open since 1965. The Emily Dickinson Museum is in Amherst, Massachusetts. www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/
Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum is in Mansfield, MO. It is the last of her homes and where she wrote her Little House books. She moved to the house and Missouri in 1894. It is a National Historic Landmark that’s open to the public for tours from March to November. https://lauraingallswilderhome.com
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home is on a 113-acre estate Lenox, MA estate. The house was built in 1902. She designed the grounds and decorated the house herself. She wrote The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome while living there. The house and grounds of this estate are open to the public, and include formal gardens based on Wharton’s original designs. She was the first woman to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. https://www.edithwharton.org/
William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak – Oxford, MS: Faulkner bought the antebellum home where he wrote many of his masterpieces in 1930. He spent decades renovating it, doing most of the work himself. One interesting feature is the handwritten outline for Faulkner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “A Fable,” penciled on the plaster wall of his study. Faulkner died in 1962 and six years later it was declared a National Historic Landmark. His daughter inherited the property and sold it to the University of Mississippi which maintains the property and operates tours year-round. www.rowanoak.com
Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore house is a 19th century two-story brick row house. He grew up in this house with his mother and two sisters. It contains literary artifacts from his life. It is a National Historic Landmark and open to the public. https://www.poeinbaltimore.org/
The Eudora Welty House and Garden is in Jackson, Mississippi. It was Welty’s home from 1925 until her death in 2001. It is the home where she wrote almost all of her fiction and essays. In 1986 she bequeathed her home and all her possessions in it to the State of Mississippi. https://eudorawelty.org/
Mark Twain House and Museum – Hartford, CT. Mark Twain’s Victorian Gothic house was built in 1874, had 25 rooms and is 11,500 square feet. Twain has said that the happiest years of his life were spent in this house. He lived in this house from 1874 to 1891. Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884. www.marktwainhouse.org
Harriet Beecher Stowe House is in Hartford, CT. She moved into the house in 1873. The house contains many of the author’s paintings and sketches. She wrote her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. https://stowehousecincy.org/index.html
Ernest Hemingway Home. Ernest Hemingway moved to Key West in 1931. His father had committed suicide and his second novel A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929. During the nine years he and his second wife lived in this house (1931–1940) Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not, The Snows Of Kilimanjaro and most of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He had a second-floor studio with a well-used Royal typewriter. The house was built in 1851, and the estate was completed in 1936. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1968. It is the home of many six-toed cats who wander through the house and around the grounds. The original six-toed cats belonged to the Hemingways and these are all the descendants. www.hemingwayhome.com
The John Steinbeck House is in Salinas, CA and is the birthplace and childhood home of one of the most widely published American authors. Steinbeck also returned to the home as an adult in 1934 to care for his elderly mother. At that time, he wrote his novella The Red Pony. Steinbeck published 27 novels, the most famous being The Grapes of Wrath which earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1940. In 1962 he won a Nobel Prize in Literature. The house museum is a Victorian-style building in downtown Salinas. It is on the National Register of Historic Places. www.steinbeckhouse.com
Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind in 1936 in this Tudor Revival in Atlanta where she and her husband rented an apartment. The house is a city landmark and a museum. Mitchell lived in the house with her husband from 1925 – 1932. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book in 1937. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. www.atlantahistorycenter.com
Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains. She was born there in 1892. She wrote The Good Earth in 1931and won the Nobel Prize in 1938. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She paved the way for female writers and was involved in humanitarian issues like immigration and adoption. https://pearlsbuckbirthplace.com/
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Home is called Wayside and is in Concord, MA. It is an 18th-century Colonial-style house. In the 19th century, Louisa May Alcott, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Margaret Sidney all lived here. The Alcotts owned the house from 1845 to 1852 and called it Hillside. Nathaniel Hawthorne and family owned the house from 1852 – 1869 and called it Wayside. In 1883 Harriet Lathrop (pen name Margaret Sidney) bought the house and were the last private family to live there. They preserved it for the public and it is now part of the National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/mima/learn/historyculture/thewayside.htm
The Edward Gorey House is also known as Elephant House. It is in Yarmouth Port, MA. Gorey bought the house in 1979 and lived in it until his death in 2000. The house is now a museum dedicated to his life and work. He was a lifelong advocate of animal welfare and kept cats as pets. He left his entire estate to his charitable trust, established for the welfare of all living creatures. He was an important American contributor to literature, art and theater. https://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org/
The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum is in Montgomery, Alabama. It is where F. Scott wrote Tender is the Night and Zelda wrote Save Me The Waltz. The couple lived there from 1931 – 1932. The site is both a museum and two Airbnbs. One is an apartment and the other is a suite. Both are part of the house. https://www.thefitzgeraldmuseum.org/
Jack Kerouac stayed with his mother at this Florida house, northwest of Orlando, in 1957. It is now home to The Kerouac Project which provides residencies for four different young writers every year. https://www.kerouacproject.org/history/
Herman Melville lived in this Pittsfield, MA farmhouse called Arrowhead after returning from a three-year whaling voyage. In 1850 he wrote Moby Dick here. He lived here from 1850 – 1862 with his large family. https://berkshirehistory.org/herman-melville-arrowhead/melville-in-the-berkshires/
The Walt Whitman Birthplace is where the famous poet lived for the first five years of his life. It was built in 1816 by Whitman’s father who was a carpenter. It is made of cedar shingles. It is a State Historic Site in Huntington, New York. https://www.waltwhitman.org/
Robert Frost – New Hampshire – This is an 1820 farm in Franconia, NH where Frost lived from 1915 – 1920. Frost, who won the Pulitzer Prize four times, published three highly acclaimed poetry collections during the years he lived there. The site is open seasonally. www.frostplace.org
Robert Frost also lived in this 1769 South Shaftsbury, Vermont home. It is now the Robert Frost Stone House Museum. It is very near his gravesite. He wrote “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” in 1922 at the dining room table here in 1922. He received his first Pulitzer Prize for that piece. https://www.bennington.edu/robert-frost-stone-house-museum
Note: There is a podcast called “Dead Writers: A Podcast about Great American Writers and Where They Lived”. I’ve listened to a few episodes, and I like it. It was created by Tess Chakkalakal, a literary critic. https://www.mainepublic.org/dead-writers
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