This unusual guide will take the tourist or the armchair traveler to literary landmarks throughout the South and Southwest. The great tradition of Southern literature comes alive in the homes of writers like Sidney Lanier, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kate Chopin, and William Faulkner. Included are many early American authors like Captain John Smith and William Byrd of Virginia, Davy Crockett of Tennessee, and Edgar Allen Poe, as well as the major figures of twentieth-century writing, like Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway. The rich and colorful writing of the Southwest is also fully covered--from Zane Grey's hunting lodge in Arizona and the locales of the works of J. Frank Dobie to the mystical landscape of New Mexico that inspired Willa Cather and D.H. Lawrence. Unexpected and offbeat places are also described: St. Simons Island, Georgia, where Fanny Kemble wrote a fascinating journal; the Rugby Restoration in Tennessee; Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, from where Washington Irving set off on a trip across the prairie; the settings of writings about the Indians of the Southwest. Here is an indispensable guidebook for the literary traveler that's also a handy desk reference for students.--Jacket flap.

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.

National Geographic leads book-loving adventurers on a whirlwind tour of 500 literary landmarks and offers practical trip-planning advice for visiting in person. Peppered with great reading suggestions and little-known tales of literary gossip, this book is the ultimate browser's delight.

Presents twenty-one walking tours of New York City, including more than one hundred sites of literary significance and featuring more than two hundred books about New York written for young readers.

Contains information about the birthplaces, homes, and workplaces of over fifteen hundred literary figures from Colonial times to the present.