For a diehard fan of the game played on the diamond, the ultimate pet project might be a pilgrimage, perhaps taken over a lifetime, to every one of the 30 Major League Baseball stadiums in the country, from elder statesman Fenway Park in Boston (circa 1912) to the newbie, Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, home to the Texas Rangers, which opened in 2020.
For all of us dedicated bookworms, however, a sojourn closer to our hearts would be making the rounds of as many a birthplace, home base or hallowed working ground of our favorite but long-gone poets, playwrights and authors as time and money would allow.
For my first trip to Merrie Olde England, for instance, I made sure to stop by 12 Tennison Road, South Norwood, in the London Borough of Croydon, but all I got to see was the blue ceramic plaque mounted there in 1973 to attest to the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame had indeed lived there from 1891-1894. And in Stratford-Upon-Avon, I stopped by the Tudor-style house where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and lived for the next 33 years, and I also rambled around in Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in the same bucolic village to soak up some vibes about his romance as 18-year-old swain with his wife-to-be.
Closer to home, there are quite a few places where famed American writers lived or worked that have been turned into shrines, some even mounting workshops or occasional productions. The Bay Area boasts two that preserve homes of winners of the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The John Steinbeck House, the author’s birthplace, is a turreted Queen Anne Victorian in downtown Salinas, at 132 Central Ave., that has been turned into a museum and, charmingly enough, a restaurant. The garage below the house has been converted into “The Best Cellar,” a gift shop. Steinbeck spent his early years as an author here as well, churning out short stories and polishing off the novels “The Red Pony” and “Tortilla Flat.” The Steinbeck House Restaurant serves lunch Tuesdays through Saturdays, and one-hour tours of all three floors of the house are conducted in the summer months. See steinbeckhouse.com for schedules, pricing and the restaurant menu.
Playwright Eugene O’Neill spent six of the most productive years of his life at Tao House in Danville, a 5,100-square-foot ranch house with a mixture of Spanish and Chinese architectural features that he and his third wife, Carlotta, bought in 1937 as a private refuge with money from his Nobel Prize. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “The Iceman Cometh” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten” were penciled out in longhand there in his study, within eyesight of the Old Barn, where the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, in cooperation with the National Park Service, started staging his plays in 1997. The house sat in 158 acres of surrounding land that was part of the original purchase, 13 acres of which now form the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site, administered by the NPS. It is free to visit Wednesdays through Sundays with tours at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., but you must register in advance and get picked up by shuttle from the Museum of San Ramon Valley at 205 Railroad Ave. in Danville. For more information, visit https://www.nps.gov/euon/index.htm.
The great American humorist, cartoonist, journalist and New Yorker contributor James Thurber lived with his family in an 1873 multistory house at 77 Jefferson Ave. in Columbus, Ohio, from 1913-17, while he was a student at Ohio State University. The previous history of the house and the land it stands on include a fire in an insane asylum that killed six women and an accidental suicide by gunshot. Until the day he died (in 1961), Thurber believed the house was haunted, and he penned a short story titled “The Day the Ghost Got In” based on a spooky experience he had in 1915 hearing incorporeal footsteps circling the dining room table. Today, you can hear more about unsettling happenings in the house if you tour Thurber House, established in 1984 as a museum and a nonprofit center that hosts literary gatherings and offers writer residencies in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor. The Thurber Center next door also administers the annual Thurber Prize for American Humor, given in the recent past to such funny people as James McBride, Dave Barry and Trevor Noah. The house is open to visitors on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, and admission is a mere $5. For much more information, visit thurberhouse.org.
If Ernest Hemingway is one of your fascinations, there are two former haunts of his you can tour: the house where he was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent the first six years of his life (hemingwaybirthplace.com) and, more famously, perhaps, the French Colonial-style mansion in Key West, Florida, that he and his second wife, Pauline, thoroughly refurbished and lived in from 1931-39. Now the most famous tourist attraction in Key West, the home and grounds are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day for walk-up visitors, who can buy the $7-$18 tickets at the main gate. Among the attractions on the estate are a huge swimming pool, salt water in Hemingway’s day, that took two to three days to refill but had to be emptied and scrubbed down of algae and debris after three days and then refilled (!), and a herd of five dozen cats that carry the polydactyl (many-toed) gene, descendants of a cat named Snow White that Hemingway was allegedly given by a sea captain friend. Find more information at hemingwayhome.com.
Take a walk through where the four “Little Women” of Louisa May Alcott’s experience-inspired imagination lived at Orchard House, a vintage 1660 manor house in Concord, Massachusetts, that her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, bought for $945 in 1857 and remodeled, naming it for the 40 apple trees that grew on the 12-acre estate. The Alcotts lived there for the next 20 years, and it was in her bedroom, on a half-moon-shaped writing shelf her father built for her, that Louisa May in 1868 finished the novel that brought her fame and fortune. The models for her main characters were her own family members. Besides her father, “Mr. March” in the book, the “Marmee” who mothered the four daughters was based on Louisa May’s own strong, former social worker mom, Abigail May Alcott. Anna Alcott, the eldest girl, inspired the character Meg; Louisa May herself became the tomboy “Jo March”; Elizabeth Sewell Alcott, though she died just before the family moved into Orchard House, was transformed into the sweet but ill-fated “Beth” in the novel. And Abba May Alcott, the youngest, inspired the young “Amy” and went on to become, like the character, an admired artist (whose studies abroad were financed by profits from the sales of “Little Women”). Now well into its second century as a nonprofit maintained historic site, Orchard House is open year-round for tours, writing camps, lectures and literary events. Visit louisamayalcott.org for information.
In the pipeline: Fifty years ago, on April 5, a somewhat down-on-his luck writer from Maine began his break into the big-time with his debut novel “Carrie,” a thriller about an abused teen who deploys her telekinetic powers to take revenge on her high school and her entire town. Now, more than five dozen books later, horrormeister Stephen King is set to publish an intriguingly titled short story collection, “You Like It Darker” (Scribner, $30, 512 pages), 12 tales designed to give readers a whole range of literal and metaphorical terrors to mull over. The book, which has already received starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews, comes out on May 21. A footnote: The first few pages of “Carrie” were assigned to the trash bin, until King’s wife, Tabitha, pulled them out, covered with cigarette ash, read them in bed and told her husband to keep going, because they were good. If you’d like a preview of the new collection, King reads from one of the stories here.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
.
.