On my many pilgrimages to writers’ homes, I have felt two reactions, often simultaneously. One is excitement at being so close to creation. The other is the breath of genius that hovers in the air – like lavender, like music – beyond the velvet rope of a study. But the other is comfort. Because my literary heroes were, to put it in the cheerful dialect of the supermarket tabloids, “just like us.” People who were annoyed by floorboards and lightning protection. Who had toilets, toasters and trash cans.

Robert Frost’s Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vermont, is just that – a stone house – but it is also the place where he wrote “The Road Not Taken.” The lines of that poem fill the rooms like winter light. Emily Dickinson’s Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, left me in awe until I saw it in its pieces: beds and windows, beams and bricks.

Another way to think about all this is personification. A writer’s house personifies its owner, giving visitors the feeling of “knowing” a (usually deceased) person who held the pen. It also personifies their writing. Here is their typewriter, here is their desk, here is something tangible on which to anchor an art form that, at its best, lets words hang in the air.

This applies to writers we admire And that we do not know. When I climb the stone steps of Hawk Tower, the seaside eagle’s nest of poet Robinson Jeffers in Carmel, California, I feel as if I am Am Jeffers, or at least his house guest. No such joy accompanied my daily walks through the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana. I count this as the badness of Ben-Hur. My dog ​​shared my disdain and frequently peed on old Lew’s trees.

When I pass a sign lately pointing to a writer’s house or glance at JD McClatchy’s illustrated book, American writers at homeI have a bad feeling. Like mildew on a frontispiece. Like mold in a crawl space. At first I thought it was just envy. We writers are envious creatures. We envy each other’s sentences. We envy each other’s successes. We even envy the sentences and successes of our predecessors who surround us in their houses.

This excitement, however, was different and newer, stretching back to 2022, when my wife and I sold our Crawfordsville home of six years, right across the street from Lew Wallace. It deepened during the year we spent in Portland, Oregon—happy beneficiaries of my sabbatical—and even after we returned to a new Hoosier zip code. By that time, the idea of a writer’s home, a residence in which an author conducts his business permanently, seemed outdated to me. Even privileged. What has changed?

It doesn’t take a coup or a fire to remind us that our lives are fragile and that our “beautiful things” will turn to ashes just like our bodies.

Well, we did. From 2022 to 2024, we bounced between three homes and returned to what had been our home market for most of our marriage: the rental market. My view of housing changed. Renting was flexible and maintenance-free. Owning was permanent and stuffy. Mortgage rates rose while active listings plummeted. Prices soared, inflation flattened (or shrunk) purchasing power. It seemed like a bad time to buy a home.

And yet, last fall, my wife and I began haunting Zillow and rushing to do early viewings. We were talking to the sons of our elderly neighbor—I am not proud of this—when that neighbor died. (She was sell, but for more than we had.) Throughout all this, I thought about the writers’ homes I had visited and whether those writers’ lives resembled my own. Was I secretly hoping to emulate their lifestyle by buying a home? Was that possible in 2024?

Not if I wanted to emulate Mark Twain, whose Hartford mansion has a billiards room and a fluted fireplace. The same goes for Edna St. Vincent Millay, who encouraged swimmers to splash around naked in her outdoor pool. Even the more modest homes, like Walt Whitman’s row house in Camden, New Jersey, reek of entitlement and stability. Photos show the elderly poet’s floors littered with papers, like a hoarder clinging to a golden past.

Of course, this is all unfair – to these writers and to me. The economics of literature have shifted. And so has its cultural capital. (Besides, it’s masochistic to compete with someone whose home address is a historic landmark.) While the Internet makes writing more democratic, writers’ homes seem elitist or taboo. Don’t touch anything! is not just a warning about rare artifacts; it is a reminder that all of this is unattainable. Today, writers’ residences represent two goals that remain distant or separate for most working writers: financial security and geographical certainty.

I have met few writers who have been able to buy a down payment through publishing, and if the AI ​​innovators have their way, I will meet even fewer. Most writers I know are peripatetic, chasing the promise of a paycheck, which they often try to secure through teaching. A “room of one’s own” was Virginia Woolf’s metaphor for the solitude that women writers needed (and were denied). But as the local Starbucks and public library, the football sideline and the playground attest, solitude is a luxury many writers cannot afford. What plaque will be placed over this Places of hastily written works? Who will visit them in 50 years to pay homage to the novels being written there?

If I am still alive then, two things will be true: my poetry will still not make any money and my mortgage will be paid off. That is right, dear reader, we did buy a house, but not because the pride of ownership or wealth creation was particularly appealing – at least in my case. Nor was the promise of a study with shelves full of books. No, I bought a house to retain the feeling, however misguided or intangible, that I had some control over my own life. That my loved ones would always be protected. That we were safe in our weatherproof ark.

The history of writers’ houses reminds me that this is a fallacy, and one that we subscribe to wholeheartedly. Ernest Hemingway lost his Finca Vigía, his residence in Havana, during the Cuban Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson watched his house in Concord burn down; he was so despondent or demented that he threw some of his belongings back into the flames. The poet Anne Bradstreet, who wrote “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House (July 10, 1666)”, suffered a very similar suffering:

Here stood the suitcase, and there the chest,
That’s where the shop I counted the most was.
My beautiful things lie in ashes,
And I won’t see her anymore.

It doesn’t take a coup or a fire to remind us that our lives are fragile and that our “beautiful things,” like our bodies, are doomed to ashes. We can install smoke detectors, map the flood plains, and test for radon. (God knows I’ve done all three things.) But disaster will inevitably find – if not our homes themselves – everything they stand for: family, contentment, a quiet place in the world.

Owning a home helps us forget that fact, if only briefly, while we put in new furniture and mow the lawn. I had almost forgotten, hidden away in my new basement home office, until I looked out my only window and saw the bees pollinating the front yard at eye level. Then I remembered the siding needed painting. Then I remembered I was already halfway underground.