(book)

A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses

There are many ways to show we care about an author besides reading his or her works. Gravesites make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular still are visits to writers’ house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the site of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home--now thoroughly remade as a decorators’ show-house.

In A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses, Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun’ Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned out shell of California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands.

Why is it that we visit writers’ houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary, and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

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Earlier Versions

"A Museum of One's Own," The American Prospect (January, 2010)

REPRESENTATIVE PASSAGE: "It's hard to imagine the two-story house on East 86th Street in Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood ever becoming a tourist destination. Pizza crusts, empty bags of spicy potato chips, and wrapping papers litter the green carpet. Huge holes dot the walls where the fixtures have been ripped out. The back door is open. "People will spend all day trying to get 10 cents worth of copper," says Jay Gardner, the community-development director for the Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation, as he picks up an old grate and puts it across the door latch to prevent another break-in" [read more].

"Fading From View: Was Thomas Wolfe a genius? And should we care?" Oxford American (September, 2009)

REPRESENTATIVE PASSAGE: "The Thomas Wolfe Memorial, in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, is being swallowed up. New developments are dwarfing the yellow frame house on every side, like that little pink house in Virginia Lee Burton’s classic children’s book. First, the Renaissance Hotel went up across the street. Then, in the summer of 2006, a developer scooped up a parking lot catty-corner from the Renaissance and began construction on new, upscale condominiums."

The Cover