Writers' homes (sometimes writer's, author's or literary houses) are locations where writers lived. Frequently, these homes are preserved as historic house museums 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. 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, museum exhibits, guided tours 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 Petrarch 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''.

Notable homes

* Orchard House (

Louisa May Alcott Louisa May Alcott (; November 29, 1832March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the novel ''Little Women'' (1868) and its sequels ''Good Wives'' (1869), ''Little Men'' (1871), and ''Jo's Boys'' ...

) *

Jane Austen's House Museum Jane Austen's House Museum is a small independent museum in the village of Chawton near Alton, Hampshire, Alton in Hampshire. It is a writer's house museum occupying the 17th-century house (informally known as Chawton Cottage) in which novelist ...

* Alexander Bestuzhev House * Brontë Parsonage Museum * Green Hills Farm ( Pearl S. Buck) *

Mikhail Bulgakov Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov ( ; rus, links=no, Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков, p=mʲɪxɐˈil ɐfɐˈnasʲjɪvʲɪdʑ bʊlˈɡakəf; – 10 March 1940) was a Russian and Soviet novelist and playwright. His novel ''The M ...

Museum:

Kyiv Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

* Robert Burns Cottage * Newstead Abbey (

Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Among his best-kno ...

) * Carlyle's House (

Thomas Carlyle Thomas Carlyle (4 December 17955 February 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher. Known as the "Sage writing, sage of Chelsea, London, Chelsea", his writings strongly influenced the intellectual and artistic culture of the V ...

's house in London) * Craigenputtock (Thomas Carlyle's estate in Scotland) * Casa de Cervantes * Melikhovo and White Dacha (

Anton Chekhov Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (; ; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, widely considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his b ...

) * Greenway Estate (

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

) * John Clare Cottage * Manning Clark House * Jean Cocteau House * Coleridge Cottage (

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

) * Firefly Estate (

Noël Coward Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 189926 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what ''Time (magazine), Time'' called "a sense of personal style, a combination of c ...

) * Cowper and Newton Museum (

William Cowper William Cowper ( ; – 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 scenes of the Engli ...

) *

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

Charles Dickens Museum The Charles Dickens Museum is an author's house museum at 48 Doughty Street in King's Cross, London, King's Cross, in the London Borough of Camden. It occupies a typical Georgian architecture, Georgian terraced house which was Charles Dickens, ...

* Emily Dickinson Museum * Château de Monte-Cristo (

Alexandre Dumas Alexandre Dumas (born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas , was a French novelist and playwright. His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the mos ...

) * Rowan Oak (

William Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer. He is best known for William Faulkner bibliography, his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in fo ...

) *

Goldeneye ''GoldenEye'' is a 1995 spy film, the seventeenth in the List of James Bond films, ''James Bond'' series produced by Eon Productions, and the first to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 agent James Bond (lit ...

(

Ian Fleming Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was a British writer, best known for his postwar ''James Bond'' series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his ...

) *

Anne Frank House The Anne Frank House () is a writer's house and biographical museum dedicated to Judaism, Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank. The building is located on a canal called the Prinsengracht, close to the Westerkerk, in Amsterdam-Centrum, central Amst ...

* Elizabeth Gaskell's House * Goethe's House and Birthplace * Edward Gorey House * Thomas Hardy's Cottage and Max Gate * Ernest Hemingway House and

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

* James Herriot's home * Schillerhaus, Leipzig ( Ludwig Ferdinand Huber) * Maison de Victor Hugo * Dr Samuel Johnson's House and Birthplace * John Keats House and Keats–Shelley House * Bateman's (

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

) * Clouds Hill ( T. E. Lawrence) * Tarkhany (

Mikhail Lermontov Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov ( , ; rus, Михаи́л Ю́рьевич Ле́рмонтов, , mʲɪxɐˈil ˈjʉrʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈlʲerməntəf, links=yes; – ) was a Russian Romanticism, Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called ...

) * Lope de Vega's house *

Arrowhead An arrowhead or point is the usually sharpened and hardened tip of an arrow, which contributes a majority of the projectile mass and is responsible for impacting and penetrating a target, or sometimes for special purposes such as signaling. ...

(

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

) * Milton's Cottage (

John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, and civil servant. His 1667 epic poem ''Paradise Lost'' was written in blank verse and included 12 books, written in a time of immense religious flux and politic ...

) * Margaret Mitchell House and Museum * Rozhdestveno Estate (

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov ( ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Rus ...

) * La Sebastiana (

Pablo Neruda Pablo Neruda ( ; ; born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto; 12 July 190423 September 1973) was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old an ...

) * Monte Cristo Cottage (

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

) * Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum * Hill Top (

Beatrix Potter Helen Beatrix Heelis (; 28 July 186622 December 1943), usually known as Beatrix Potter ( ), was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. She is best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as '' ...

) * Abbotsford (

Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European literature, European and Scottish literature, notably the novels ''Ivanhoe'' (18 ...

) * Shakespeare's Birthplace * Shandy Hall (

Laurence Sterne Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric. He is best known for his comic novels ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'' (1759–1767) and ''A Sentimental Journey Thro ...

) *

Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (; June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American author and Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and wrote the popular novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (185 ...

House ( Brunswick,

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ; colloquially nicknamed Cincy) is a city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the northern side of the confluence of the Licking River (Kentucky), Licking and Ohio Ri ...

Hartford Hartford is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. The city, located in Hartford County, Connecticut, Hartford County, had a population of 121,054 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 ce ...

) * 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 ...

) * Dylan Thomas Boathouse *

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 The New Yorker, ''New Yorker'' cartoonist James Thurber. Thurber House is dedicated to promoting the lite ...

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

(

Leo Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Tolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; ,Throughout Tolstoy's whole life, his name was written as using Reforms of Russian orthography#The post-revolution re ...

) * Mark Twain House *

Strawberry Hill House Strawberry Hill House—often called simply Strawberry Hill—is a Gothic Revival architecture, Gothic Revival villa that was built in Twickenham, London, by Horace Walpole (1717–1797) from 1749 onward. It is a typical example of the "#Strawb ...

(

Horace Walpole Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (; 24 September 1717 – 2 March 1797), better known as Horace Walpole, was an English Whig politician, writer, historian and antiquarian. He had Strawberry Hill House built in Twickenham, southwest London ...

) * The Mount (

Edith Wharton Edith Newbold Wharton (; ; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gil ...

) *

Highbury Highbury is an area of North London, England, in the London Borough of Islington. Highbury Manor Highbury was once owned by Ranulf, brother of Ilger, and included all the areas north and east of Canonbury and Holloway Roads. The manor hou ...

( Patrick White) * Walt Whitman House * Monk's House (

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device. Vir ...

) * Dove Cottage and

Rydal Mount Rydal Mount is a house in the small village of Rydal, Cumbria, 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' ...

(

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

) * Yr Ysgwrn ( Hedd Wyn (Ellis Humphrey Evans)) *

Casa Stefan Zweig The Casa Stefan Zweig is legally regarded as a private charitable organisation, which was founded in 2006 by a group of interested private donors, to establish a writer's house museum, that is dedicated to the author, in the last residence of St ...

(

Stefan Zweig Stefan Zweig ( ; ; 28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942) was an Austrian writer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world. Zweig was raised in V ...

) * Ernesto Sabato's House Museum * Villa Ocampo ( Victoria Ocampo) * Museo Gauchesco Ricardo Güiraldes * Maria Elena Walsh's House Museum * House of Ricardo Rojas * House Museum “El Paraíso” of Manuel Mujica Láinez * Museum Poeta Lugones * Horacio Quiroga's House Museum * Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's House Museum * Writers' House

Notable homes

See also

References

Further reading