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 Literary tourism is a type of cultural tourism that deals with places and events from literary texts as well as the lives of their authors. This could include visiting particular place associated with a novel or a novelist, such as a writer's home ...

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

, 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 exhibits, guided tours and

poetry reading A poetry reading is a public oral recitation or performance of poetry. Reading poetry aloud allows the reader to express their own experience through poetry, changing the poem according to their sensibilities. The reader uses pitch and stress, and ...

s. ''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''.

Notable homes

* Jane Austen's House Museum *

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 Yorks ...

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 Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973) was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for ''The Good Earth'' a bestselling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, Pulitze ...

) * Mikhail Bulgakov Museum:

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

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 millio ...

* Robert Burns Cottage *

Newstead Abbey Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, England, was formerly an Augustinian priory. Converted to a domestic home following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, it is now best known as the ancestral home of Lord Byron. Monastic foundation The prio ...

(

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 peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...

) * 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) *

Greenway Estate Greenway, also known as Greenway House, is an estate on the River Dart near Galmpton in Devon, England. Once the home of the author Agatha Christie, it is now owned by the National Trust. The estate is served by a steam railway service with tr ...

( Agatha Christie) *

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 ...

) *

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 sce ...

) *

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 The Charles Dickens Museum is an author's house museum at 48 Doughty Street in King's Cross, in the London Borough of Camden. It occupies a typical Georgian terraced house which was Charles Dickens's home from 25 March 1837 (a year after h ...

Emily Dickinson Museum The Emily Dickinson Museum is a historic house museum consisting of two houses: the Dickinson Homestead (also known as Emily Dickinson Home or Emily Dickinson House) and the Evergreens. The Dickinson Homestead was the birthplace and home from 1 ...

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) *

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 o ...

) *

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

* 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 ...

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 * 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 ...

(

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 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, as well as to fulfill some special purposes such as sign ...

(

Herman Melville Herman Melville ( born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are ''Moby-Dick'' (1851); ''Typee'' (1846), a rom ...

) * Milton's Cottage ( John Milton) *

Margaret Mitchell House and Museum The Margaret Mitchell House is a historic house museum located in Atlanta, Georgia. The structure was the home of author Margaret Mitchell in the early 20th century. It is located in Midtown, at 979 Crescent Avenue. Constructed by Cornelius J ...

* Rozhdestveno Estate (

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bor ...

) *

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 Nobel Prize in Literature, literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama tech ...

) *

Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, located at 203 North Amity St. in Baltimore, Maryland, is the former home of American writer Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830s. The small unassuming structure, which was opened as a writer's house museum in 1949, ...

* Hill Top (

Beatrix Potter Helen Beatrix Potter (, 28 July 186622 December 1943) was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. She is best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as '' The Tale of Peter Rabbit'', which was ...

) * 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 Shakespeare's Birthplace is a restored 16th-century half-timbered house situated in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, where it is believed that William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and spent his childhood years.

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 Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768), was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric who wrote the novels ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'' and '' A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy'', publishe ...

) * Harriet Beecher Stowe 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 Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since t ...

) *

Farringford House Farringford House, in the village of Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, was the home of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from 1853 until his death in 1892. The main house dates from 1806 with gothic embellishments and extensions added from the 1830s. ...

( Alfred, Lord Tennyson) *

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 The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, was the home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) and his family from 1874 to 1891. It was designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter and built in the American High Gothic style. Clemens bi ...

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

( Horace Walpole) * The Mount ( Edith Wharton) *

Highbury Highbury is a district in North London and part of the London Borough of Islington in Greater London that was owned by Ranulf brother of Ilger and included all the areas north and east of Canonbury and Holloway Roads. The manor house was sit ...

( Patrick White) * Walt Whitman House *

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 Dove Cottage is a house on the edge of Grasmere in the Lake District of England. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of ...

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 museu ...

(

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