A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses, in Photos

Ernest Hemingway House and Museum in Key West, Florida

Hemingway lived for decades as an American celebrity, and he had an intensely conflicted relationship to publicity. "It is queer to find one’s own day before y

Ernest Hemingway House and Museum in Key West, Florida

"It was bad for a writer," Hemingway maintained, "when he started to think of himself as a character." After the infamous Lillian Ross profile of him,

Herman Melville's Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Herman Melville bought Arrowhead—a Georgian-style farmhouse built in 1780—in 1850. Parts of the original structure are lost: The piazza that inspired his Piazza T

Edgar Allen Poe Cottage, Bronx, New York

The New York Shakespeare Society saved the Poe houses in the Bronx, New York, from demolition in 1895. The state wanted to widen Kingsbridge Road and demolish the house, but the group lobbied to

Edgar Allen Poe Cottage, Bronx, New York

I think we should hang our heads for our country and for ourselves, when we think that while for half a century we have, as a nation, contributed liberally to every appeal to build memorials to

Edgar Allen Poe Cottage, Bronx, New York

Today, the Bronx County Historical Society, which owns the house, is struggling again.

Wolf House, Jack London State Historic Park, Glen Ellen, California

Jack London hired the famed San Francisco architect Albert Farr to build Wolf House in 1911. He decided to use only local materials. He felled redwood trees and then l

Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, Hannibal, Missouri

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." 

—Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's N

Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, Hannibal, Missouri

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be