Read My Book? Tour My House

In an essay in the New York Times, there's a discussion of touring authors' houses and how most people tour them not for the authors themselves.

From the piece...

By my count, there are 73 writers’ houses open to the public in the United States. Not all provoke the awestruck response of the self-selected group at the Mailer house. According to curator and tour-guide estimates, only about half of the 2,000 people who visit the Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J., each year come because they are interested in Whitman (as opposed to a nice historical stopover after touring the battleship down the road). Just 10 percent of the 9,000 annual visitors to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, N.C., come specifically for the author. Most people who visit the Mount, Edith Wharton’s lavish estate in tourist-friendly Lenox, Mass., are killing time before a concert at Tanglewood (and tend not to continue to Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s modest homestead in the nearby depressed industrial city of Pittsfield). Half of the 182,000 annual visitors to Hemingway’s house in Key West say they come for the cats.

It’s tempting to write off the interest in writers’ real estate to American materialism, but literary pilgrimages — and resistance to them — have a long history. Petrarch’s birthplace in Arezzo was preserved in the 14th century, while he was still alive, though the poet found the idea preposterous, as he had never lived there and considered Florence his home. The Casa di Dante, near the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, is utterly ersatz — the guidebook on sale at the ticket counter says of the bedroom, “This was certainly not Dante’s bedroom.” In England, writers began visiting Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon (which may or may not have been the house where Shakespeare was born) in the 18th century, followed in the 19th by the tourist hordes. More keep opening up: you can now tour — and sleep in — Agatha Christie’s house in Devon, where several of her books were set.

American writers’ houses can be spotty in their chronology, as well as their historical accuracy. New York may be the nation’s literary capital, but there is only one writer’s house museum in the five boroughs: Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage in the Bronx, where he spent the last few years of his life. The contents of Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village living room were preserved, but moved to Philadelphia. The Whitman house displays old-timey paper the curator bought across the river at the Ben Franklin print shop in Philadelphia, even though Franklin predates Whitman by a century. Hannibal, Mo., has plaques announcing where events from Mark Twain’s books — Tom painting the fence, Huck fishing — took place, though of course none of these things really happened. The Poe house in Baltimore — one of several dwellings (including a dorm room at the University of Virginia) preserved in honor of the peripatetic writer — shows a video in which school kids tell us Poe is important because he helped spawn the TV series “Moonlighting” (does anyone remember “Moonlighting”?).

Pictured above: Walt Whitman's house in Camden, New Jersey.