Description:
A house is doubly important to a writer--not only as a home for oneself, but often as a workplace in which to write quietly and undisturbed (a concept Virginia Woolf lobbied for in her famous book A Room of One's Own). Writers' Houses captures these intimate places in which some of the world's greatest writers spent their most creative hours. Twenty renowned writers of the last century are profiled in the places they lived, including Ernest Hemingway, Alberto Moravia, Hermann Hesse, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, among others. Some of these authors' houses form a part of the oeuvre in which they write--Ernest Hemingway's Key West home or William Faulkner's Mississippi mansion, for example. In fact, many of the authors in Writers' Houses, such as Isak Dinesen, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, and Vita Sackville-West, were influenced by their homes and surroundings to the extent that their reputations are inextricably linked to those places. The large color photographs reveal the private places in which these authors lived and worked, surrounded by photos of loved ones, mementos of travels, and views of their gardens or the sea. Author Francesca Premoli-Droulers writes eloquently of the events that led to the purchase of each home, as well as the activities that took place there. Many of the writers featured here led lives full of turbulence and upheaval at one time or another, and their homes marked one of the few places in which they found a place to write in solitude and comfort. Writers' Houses allows us access into these writers' private worlds, where some of their most famous creations came to life. --Kris Law
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