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A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses / Anne Trubek.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2011]Copyright date: ©2011Description: 1 online resource (176 p.) : 10 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812242928
  • 9780812205817
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 810.9 22
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. The Irrational Allure of Writers’ Houses -- Chapter 2. Trying to Find Whitman in Camden -- Chapter 3. Never the Twain Shall Meet -- Chapter 4. The Concord Pilgrimage -- Chapter 5. Hemingway’s Breadcrumb Trail -- Chapter 6. Not That Tom Wolfe -- Chapter 7. Best-Laid Plans at Jack London State Historic Park -- Chapter 8. The Compensation of Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Chapter 9. Poe Houses and Arrested Decay -- Chapter 10. At Home with Charles Chesnutt and Langston Hughes -- American Writers’ Houses Open to the Public -- Notes -- Acknowledgments
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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812205817

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. The Irrational Allure of Writers’ Houses -- Chapter 2. Trying to Find Whitman in Camden -- Chapter 3. Never the Twain Shall Meet -- Chapter 4. The Concord Pilgrimage -- Chapter 5. Hemingway’s Breadcrumb Trail -- Chapter 6. Not That Tom Wolfe -- Chapter 7. Best-Laid Plans at Jack London State Historic Park -- Chapter 8. The Compensation of Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Chapter 9. Poe Houses and Arrested Decay -- Chapter 10. At Home with Charles Chesnutt and Langston Hughes -- American Writers’ Houses Open to the Public -- Notes -- Acknowledgments

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

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.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Apr 2024)