Writers' homes (sometimes writer's, author's or literary houses) are locations where writers lived. Frequently, these homes are preserved as

historic house museum A historic house museum is a house of historic significance that has been transformed into a museum. Historic furnishings may be displayed in a way that reflects their original placement and usage in a home. Historic house museums are held to a ...

s and literary tourism destinations, called writer's home museums, especially when the homes are those of famous literary figures. Frequently these buildings are preserved to communicate to visitors more about the author than their work and its historical context. These exhibits are a form of

biographical criticism Biographical criticism is a form of literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their works of literature. Biographical criticism is often associated with historical-biographical c ...

. Visitors of the sites who are participating in literary tourism, are often fans of the authors, and these fans find deep emotional and physical connections to the authors through their visits. Sites include a range of activities common to cultural heritage sites, such as

living history Living history is an activity that incorporates historical tools, activities and dress into an interactive presentation that seeks to give observers and participants a sense of stepping back in time. Although it does not necessarily seek to ree ...

museum exhibit Exhibit design (or exhibition design) is the process of developing an exhibit—from a concept through to a physical, three-dimensional exhibition. It is a continually evolving field, drawing on innovative, creative, and practical solutions to t ...

guided tours A tour guide (U.S.) or a tourist guide (European) is a person who provides assistance, information on cultural, historical and contemporary heritage to people on organized sightseeing and individual clients at educational establishments, religio ...

and poetry readings. ''New York Times'' commentator Anne Trubek counted 73 such houses in the United States. The tradition of preserving houses or sites important to famous authors has a long history: in the 14th century Petrarch's birthplace was preserved, despite Petrach barely spending time there as a child. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century France, photojournalism which represented authors homes created an increased public interest in writers' private lives, making their homes destinations. The public popular imagination around these literary homes is a central theme of the satirical novel ''

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England ''An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England'' is a 2007 novel by Brock Clarke. Plot The novel centers on a man who accidentally burns down the home of Emily Dickinson, and in the process, kills a couple who were making love in her be ...

''.

Notable homes

Jane Austen's House Museum Jane Austen's House Museum is a small independent museum in the village of Chawton near Alton in Hampshire. It is a writer's house museum occupying the 17th-century house (informally known as Chawton Cottage) in which novelist Jane Austen spent t ...

Brontë Parsonage Museum The Brontë Parsonage Museum is a writer's house museum maintained by the Brontë Society in honour of the Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne. The museum is in the former Brontë family home, the parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire ...

Green Hills Farm The Pearl S. Buck House, formerly known as Green Hills Farm, is the 67- acre homestead in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Nobel-prize-winning American author Pearl Buck lived for 40 years, raising her family, writing, pursuing humanitarian i ...

( Pearl S. Buck) *

Mikhail Bulgakov Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov ( rus, links=no, Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков, p=mʲɪxɐˈil ɐfɐˈnasʲjɪvʲɪtɕ bʊlˈɡakəf; – 10 March 1940) was a Soviet writer, medical doctor, and playwright active in the fir ...

Museum:

Kyiv Kyiv, also spelled Kiev, is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the List of European cities by populat ...

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

* Robert Burns Cottage * Newstead Abbey (

Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and Peerage of the United Kingdom, peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and h ...

) * Thomas Carlyle's House *

Casa de Cervantes The Casa de Cervantes ("Cervantes' House") is a museum located in the city of Valladolid, Spain. The building was the home of the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. It is not to be confused with other houses associated with Cervantes, the birthpl ...

Melikhovo Melikhovo (russian: Ме́лихово) is a writer's house museum in the former country estate of the Russian playwright and writer Anton Chekhov. Chekhov lived in the estate from March 1892 until August 1899, and it is where he wrote some of hi ...

and

White Dacha The White Dacha (russian: белая дача; uk, біла дача) is the house that Anton Chekhov had built in Yalta and in which he wrote some of his greatest work. It is now a writer's house museum. Building The White Dacha was built in 18 ...

(

Anton Chekhov Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (; 29 January 1860 Old Style date 17 January. – 15 July 1904 Old Style date 2 July.) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career ...

) * Greenway Estate (

Agatha Christie Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictiona ...

) *

John Clare Cottage John Clare Cottage is a cottage and literary museum in Helpston, Peterborough, United Kingdom. The cottage was the birthplace of English poet John Clare (1793-1864). The thatched Grade II* cottage at 12 Woodgate, Helpston, originally consisted of ...

Manning Clark House The Manning Clark House, designed by Australian architect, Robin Boyd in 1952, is a house located at 11 Tasmania Circle, , a suburb of Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. The house was built for Professor Manning Clark (1915 – 1991), ...

Jean Cocteau House The Jean Cocteau House was the residence of the French poet, artist, playwright and film maker Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), which he purchased with the film actor Jean Marais in 1947, and where he created many of his later works before his dea ...

Coleridge Cottage Coleridge Cottage is a cottage situated in Nether Stowey, Bridgwater, Somerset, England. It is a grade II* listed building. The 17th century cottage was originally two buildings which were later combined and expanded. In 1797 the poet Samuel ...

(

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poe ...

) *

Cowper and Newton Museum The Cowper and Newton Museum is a museum in Olney, Buckinghamshire, England, in the City of Milton Keynes. Celebrating the work and lives of two famous local residents: William Cowper (1731–1800), a celebrated 18th-century poet; and John Newt ...

(

William Cowper William Cowper ( ; 26 November 1731 – 25 April 1800) was an English poet and Anglican hymnwriter. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th-century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scen ...

) *

Osamu Dazai Memorial Museum The , also commonly referred to as , is a writer's home museum located in the Kanagi area of Goshogawara in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. It is dedicated to the late author Osamu Dazai, who spent some of his early childhood in Kanagi, and houses ant ...

* Charles Dickens Museum * Emily Dickinson Museum *

Château de Monte-Cristo The Château de Monte-Cristo is a writer's house museum located at Le Port-Marly in the Yvelines department of northern France. It was originally built as a residence for Alexandre Dumas, ''père''. History The château was designed by the arc ...

(

Alexandre Dumas Alexandre Dumas (, ; ; born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (), 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas père (where '' '' is French for 'father', to distinguish him from his son Alexandre Dumas fils), was a French writer ...

) *

Rowan Oak Rowan Oak is William Faulkner's former home in Oxford, Mississippi. It is a primitive Greek Revival house built in the 1840s by Colonel Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant planter from Tennessee. Faulkner purchased the house when it was in disrepai ...

(

William Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of ...

) * Anne Frank House * Elizabeth Gaskell's House * Goethe's House and

Birthplace The place of birth (POB) or birthplace is the place where a person was born. This place is often used in legal documents, together with name and date of birth, to uniquely identify a person. Practice regarding whether this place should be a cou ...

Edward Gorey House The Edward Gorey House, also known as the Elephant House, is the home on Cape Cod in which Edward Gorey—author, illustrator, puppeteer, and playwright—lived and worked from 1986 until his death in 2000. The house currently serves as a museum ...

Thomas Hardy's Cottage Thomas Hardy's Cottage, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, is a small cob and thatch building that is the birthplace of the English author Thomas Hardy. He was born there in 1840 and lived in the cottage until he was aged 34—during which time he w ...

and

Max Gate Max Gate is the former home of Thomas Hardy and is located on the outskirts of Dorchester, Dorset, England. It was designed and built by Thomas Hardy for his own use in 1885 and he lived there until his death in 1928. In 1940 it was bequeathed ...

Ernest Hemingway House The Ernest Hemingway House was the residence of American writer Ernest Hemingway in the 1930s. The house is situated on the island of Key West in Florida. It is at 907 Whitehead Street, across from the Key West Lighthouse, close to the southern ...

and

Cottage A cottage, during Feudalism in England, England's feudal period, was the holding by a cottager (known as a Cotter (farmer), cotter or ''bordar'') of a small house with enough garden to feed a family and in return for the cottage, the cottager ...

* James Herriot's home *

Maison de Victor Hugo Maison de Victor Hugo () is a writer's house museum located where Victor Hugo lived for 16 years between 1832 and 1848.Information sheet from the Maire de Paris entitled 'Maisons de Victor Hugo'. It is one of the 14 City of Paris' Museums that hav ...

* Dr Samuel Johnson's House and

* John Keats House and Keats–Shelley House *

Bateman's Bateman's is a 17th-century house located in Burwash, East Sussex, England. It was the home of Rudyard Kipling from 1902 until his death in 1936. The house was built in 1634. Kipling's widow Caroline bequeathed the house to the National Trust o ...

(

Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. ...

) *

Tarkhany Tarkhany ( rus, Тарха́ны, p=tɐˈrxanɨ) is a Writer's house museum in a Russian estate where the Romantic writer Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) spent his childhood and was buried. The late 18th Century–early 19th Century estate is loc ...

(

Mikhail Lermontov Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (; russian: Михаи́л Ю́рьевич Ле́рмонтов, p=mʲɪxɐˈil ˈjurʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈlʲɛrməntəf; – ) was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucas ...

) * Lope de Vega's house * Arrowhead (

Herman Melville Herman Melville (Name change, born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American people, American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance (literature), American Renaissance period. Among his bes ...

) *

Milton's Cottage Milton's Cottage is a timber-framed 16th-century building in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St Giles. It was the former home of writer John Milton, and is open to the public as a writer's house museum. Overview In 1665 Milton and his ...

(

John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem '' Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political ...

) * Margaret Mitchell House and Museum * Rozhdestveno Estate ( Vladimir Nabokov) *

Monte Cristo Cottage Monte Cristo Cottage (also known as Eugene O'Neill Summer House) was the summer home of American actor James O'Neill and his family, notably his son Eugene O'Neill. It is a National Historic Landmark located at 325 Pequot Avenue in New London, ...

(

Eugene O'Neill Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier ...

) * Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum *

Hill Top A hill is a landform that extends above the surrounding terrain. It often has a distinct summit. Terminology The distinction between a hill and a mountain is unclear and largely subjective, but a hill is universally considered to be not as ...

( Beatrix Potter) * Abbotsford (

Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy' ...

) * Shakespeare's Birthplace *

Shandy Hall Shandy Hall is a writer's house museum in the former home of the Rev. Laurence Sterne in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, England. Sterne lived there from 1760 to 1768 as perpetual curate of Coxwold. He is remembered for his novels ''The Life and Op ...

( Laurence Sterne) *

Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (; June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American author and abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and became best known for her novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (1852), which depicts the harsh ...

House ( Brunswick,

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

, Hartford) * Farringford House (

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...

) *

Dylan Thomas Boathouse The Boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, was where Dylan Thomas lived with his family during his last four years between 1949 and 1953. The house is set in a cliff overlooking the Tâf estuary and is where he wrote many of his major pieces. It has been ...

James Thurber House Thurber House is a literary center for readers and writers located in Columbus, Ohio, in the historic former home of author, humorist, and ''New Yorker'' cartoonist James Thurber. Thurber House is dedicated to promoting the literary arts by p ...

Yasnaya Polyana Yasnaya Polyana ( rus, Я́сная Поля́на, p=ˈjasnəjə pɐˈlʲanə, literally: "Bright Glade") is a writer's house museum, the former home of the writer Leo Tolstoy. Bartlett, p. 25 It is southwest of Tula, Russia, and from Mosco ...

(

Leo Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...

) * Mark Twain House * Strawberry Hill House (

Horace Walpole Horatio Walpole (), 4th Earl of Orford (24 September 1717 – 2 March 1797), better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whigs (British political party), Whig politician. He had Strawb ...

) * The Mount (

Edith Wharton Edith Wharton (; born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and interior designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray ...

) * Highbury (

Patrick White Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was a British-born Australian writer who published 12 novels, three short-story collections, and eight plays, from 1935 to 1987. White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, ...

) *

Walt Whitman House The Walt Whitman House is a historic building in Camden, New Jersey, United States, which was the last residenceHaas, 141 of American poet Walt Whitman, in his declining years before his death. It is located at 330 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bou ...

Monk's House Monk's House is a 16th-century weatherboarded cottage in the village of Rodmell, three miles (4.8 km) south of Lewes, East Sussex, England. The writer Virginia Woolf and her husband, the political activist, journalist and editor Leonard ...

(

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born i ...

) * Dove Cottage and

Rydal Mount Rydal Mount is a house in the small village of Rydal, near Ambleside in the English Lake District. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth from 1813 to his death in 1850. It is currently operated as a writer's home museum. ...

(

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ' ...

)

Notable homes

See also

References

Further reading