A skeptic's guide to writers' houses / Anne Trubek.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Trubek, Anne, 1966-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors, American--Homes and haunts.

Authors, American.

Literary landmarks--United States.

Literary landmarks.

Authors and readers--United States.

Authors and readers.

American literature--Appreciation--United States.

American literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (174 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are 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 point 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 decorator's 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 a 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.

Contents:

The irrational allure of writers' houses

Trying to find Whitman in Camden

Never the Twain shall meet

The Concord pilgrimage

Hemingway's breadcrumb trail

Not that Tom Wolfe

Best-laid plans at Jack London State Historic Park

The compensation of Paul Laurence Dunbar

Poe houses and arrested decay

At home with Charles Chesnutt and Langston Hughes

American writers' houses open to the public.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9781283896528

1283896524

9780812205817

0812205812

OCLC:

794700572