Literature and The Arts PDF

AMERICAN HISTORIC PLACES
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TURE and the URTIi

Ray Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser
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Literature and the Arts
Ray Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser
Facts On File, Inc.

EG BR
J
E159
.S68
1997
American Historic Places: Literature and the Arts

Copyright© 1997 by Ray Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact:
Facts On File, Inc.
1 1 Penn Plaza
New York NY 10001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spangenberg, Ray, 1939-

American historic places literature and the arts
: / Ray
Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN0-8160-3401-X
1. Historic sites — —
United States ^Juvenile literature.
2. Literary landmarks — —
United States ^Juvenile literature.
3. Artists — — —
Homes and haunts United States ^Juvenile literature.
I.Moser, Diane, 1944- . II.Title.
E159.S68 1997
700' 92'273—dc20
. 96-25939
Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for
businesses, associations, institutions or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department
in New York at 212/967-8800 or 800/322-8755.
Text design by Cathy Rincon

Cover design by Dorothy Wachtenheim
Illustrations pages iv, 8, 19, 34, 53, 110, 132, 134, 141 by Jeremy Eagle
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
RRD/INNO 10 987654321
I
L memory of Lloyd Spangenburg
uncle, friend and mentor
1929-94
CHARLES M. RUSSELL MEMORIAL 60
Home and Studio of Artist Charles M. Russell
Great Falls, Montana
TALIESIN WEST 71
Home and Studio of Architect Frank Lloyd Wright
Scottsdale, Arizona
WILLA GATHER PIONEER MEMORIAL 84

Childhood Home of Novelist Willa Cather
Red Cloud, Nebraska
BEALE STREET 95
Spiritual Home of W. C. Handy and the Blues
Memphis, Tennessee
CONNEMARA 1 04
Home of Poet Carl Sandburg
Flat Rock, North Carolina
TOR HOUSE AND HAWK TOWER 115

Home of Poet Robinson Jeffers
Carmel, California
ROWAN OAK 125

Home of Novelist William Faulkner
Oxford, Mississippi
THOMAS WOLFE MEMORIAL 137

Home of Novelist Thomas Wolfe
Asheville, North Carolina
More Places to Visit 1 49
More Reading Sources 1 55
Index 1 57
PREFACE TO THE SERIES
History doesn't have to be dry or stuffy. And it isn't exclusively about

military skirmishes and legislative proclamations —they make up
only a small part of it. History is the story of life events that hap-
pened to people who cared as passionately about their lives as we care
about ours. And it's the story of events that often continue to shape and
influence our lives today. But getting to the human side of these stories isn't
always easy. That's why there's nothing like visiting the place where an
event actually occurred to get the feel of what it all meant.
The study of —what happened a particular and how
historic places at site
the lives of the people there were affected — has emerged great way to as a
approach history, to "relive" the experience and open up to the immense
diversity of American culture. Every community and region is rich in such
places —places that highlight real stories about real people and events. Even
ifyou can't actually visit such a place, the next best thing is to go there
through pictures and words. Use this book and the other books in this series
as jumping-off points and look around your community for places where
you can experience the world of the people who once lived in your own
—
region and begin exploring!
VII
Each volume in this series explores a different aspect of U.S. history by
focusing on a few select places. This book takes a look at historic places in the
United States associated with literature and the arts —painting, sculpture,
architecture and music. Of course, choosing exactly which places to focus on
in each book was one of the most difficult tasks of this project. We limited our
choices to sites that had either been restored or maintained in authentic his-
toric condition —
most are National Historic Landmarks, chosen by the U.S.
government to be preserved for their historic significance. We also tried to
include examples from a wide variety of locations, artists, types of sites and
time periods. We then limited our selections to just a few. But many other fas-
cinating places exist throughout the country, and that's why we mentioned
other related sites at some chapters (under Exploring Further) and
the end of
added a list of additional sites at the back of the book (More Places to Visit).
Each chapter begins with information about the site (At a Glance). Then
—
we explore the place what it's like and who lived there, how the place
related to that person's life and work, and what it's like to visit there today.
We also look closely at one feature of the site in A Close-Up section, fol-
lowed by a section recapping how the site came to be a protected historic

site (Preserving It for the Future). A list of books and other resources con-
cludes each chapter (Exploring Further), directing readers to either a
broader or closer view of arts and literature in the United States.
Exploring historic sites not only provides a way to experience past events
with fresh vividness and immediacy, it also offers a way of seeing the past
through new eyes, through the eyes of those who lived it. For this adven-
ture —and it can prove to be a lifetime adventure — this series will have
accomplished its purpose if it provides the springboard for future explo-
rations. In the words of an old Gaelic greeting, "May the wind be always at
your back and may the road rise up to meet you" as you travel down these
avenues of historical experience.

VIII
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many we and
people have given time and talents to help us with this
would like to thank them all, including Caroline Wistar

book,
and Pat Connolly of La Salle University, Joseph Dryfhout at the

Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Connie Hudson Backlund and Bess
Gibbs at Connemara, Jennifer Huget at the Mark Twain House, Penny
Fowler at Taliesin West, Cynthia Shearer at Rowan Oak, and Ted Mitchell
and Steve Hill at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. And at Facts On File, spe-
cial thanks to Emily Spectre; to our sharp-eyed and sharp-thinking editor,
Nicole Bowen; and to James Warren, who helped us conceptualize the

series.
IX
INTRODUCTION
Writers and have always had a love-hate relationship with

artists
the societies inwhich they lived. And American writers and

artists are no different from any other. Just as society naturally
holds fast to conformity and tradition, art and artist tend naturally toward
discontent, rebellion and change. And so art pushes civilization to extend
beyond itself to new horizons, to understand itself in new ways and to see
the world with fresh perspectives.
From Louisa May Alcott's rebellious desire to live a fuller, more inde-
pendent life than most women of her time did; to Frank Lloyd Wright's
iconoclastic vision of what a house should look like; to W. C. Handy's
yearning to play the music that he heard in his heart —American artists of
all disciplines have, much like their counterparts in other countries, cut new
paths and lived independent lives forged from the inner fires of their imagi-
nations.
At the same time, artists in the United States — writers, painters, sculp-
tors, architects, musicians —have always been influenced by the land in
which they and both the places of their childhoods and the places of
lived,
their adult years tell us much about the artistic experience that their lives
embodied. Charles Willson Peale's farm Belfield exudes the essence of that
XI
artist's aesthetic and the muhipHcity of his interests. Orchard House, the
home of Louisa May Alcott and her family, evokes both her father's philo-
sophic and educational concerns and her own resolute will to pursue a writ-
ing career. The house that Mark Twain built in Hartford evokes the writer's
love of fun, good company, family, creativity and imagination. And at
Winslow Homer's studio at Front's Neck, you can imagine yourself stand-
ing at the artist's side, looking out at the crashing waves along the coast of
Maine that he loved to paint. These are just a few of the places you'll go in
this book. Each of these sites brings you into the special world of the artist
who lived there, and whether your journey is vicarious or real, the new
insights gained make the trip well worth taking.
So travel with us now into the worlds of 13 American artists, through the
places they lived. Whether these places were loved or hated by them; cele-
brated, or condemned; retreated to or fled from; in all cases you will find
—
much richness there a voyage into the past and into the essence of creative
minds.

XII
Belfield I
FARM OF PAINTER CHARLES WILLSON PEALE
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
AT A GLANCE
Built: ca. 1750
Home and farm of Chades Willson Peale from 1810 to 1821
Noted for his portraits of George Washington and other prominent

American figures, Peale purchased this country house and gardens in 1810.
The original property spanned 104 acres located on the outskirts of

Germantown, a settlement iust northwest of Philadelphia
(now a section of the city itself).
Address:
Belfield
La Salle University
100 Clarkson Avenue
Philadelphia
PA 19141-1199
(215)951-1221
(La Salle Art Museum)
1
ir
A sort of "American Leonardo," Charles W/7/son Peak was an artist, inventor,
writer, founder of tfie first museum in America, promoter of its first art academy.
and gentleman farmer. And Belfield. his farm, epitomized much that
Peale loved in life

— invention, creation and nature.
These amusements cost some money and much time, the labour
gave health, and happiness is the result of constant
employment; his inventions pleased himself, and they gave
pleasure to others, and offended none — being perfectly
innocent, but the economist will say, time, money and labour
was misspent. He answers that happiness is worth millions.
— Charles Willson Peale in his autobiography, writing

(in the third person) of his life at Belfield
Charles Willson Peak's Belfield Farm. The stone building in the foreground is the original spring
house, with the main house to the left behind it. (Martha Ledger. Courtesy of La Salle University,
Philadelphia. Penn.)

24
Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) was 69 when he bought Belfield
in 1810. It was a larger property than he was well prepared to buy
were down on his paintings, while his expenses, with 17 chil-
sales
dren, were high. But he was so taken by the beauty of the place that he
couldn't pass it up. He made a down payment of $7,000 cash —quite a large
sum at the time —agreeing to pay the remaining $2,500 with interest over
the next two years. Then Peale moved there with his wife Hannah (his
third) and several of his children.
Immediately, Peale set about landscaping and planting his new farm,
outfitting the property with a barrage of inventions of his own devising
apple parer, corn planter, milk cart and a cotton mill, to name a few. He
exchanged letters with Thomas Jefferson about planting techniques, about
his use of the Jefferson plow and clover-seed machine. And he invented a
windmill that could withstand the foulest Atlantic seaboard storm.
Peak's farm never turned a profit, although produced wheat, hay,
it
corn, potatoes, vegetables and fruits, dairy products and currant wine (the
only profitable product). Managing finances was never his strong point. But
Peale's family shared his enthusiasm — his son Rubens, in particular,
worked long and hard at his father's side in the garden. And they would
return "weary and aching with work at the machinery, at the planting and
digging . there always waiting would be Hannah."
. .
Peale named many of his children after famous painters and gave art —
instruction to nine of them. Several did become notable artists, including
Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), who was one of the earliest and best
American still life painters; Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), an accom-
phshed portraitist; Rubens Peale (1784-1865), who painted nature subjects
and later opened a museum in New York City; Titian Ramsay Peale
(1799-1885), an explorer and naturalist who did scientific illustrations;
and Angelica Kauffmann (Peale) Robinson (1775-1853), whose early
sketches were copied by her younger brothers.
Their father, Charles Willson, meanwhile, felt a certain sense of guilt at
spending so little time on his painting during these years at Belfield. Of
course, he made hundreds of sketches of the grounds and numerous land-
scapes during this period. But the farm proved a powerful distraction to the
man who had gained a reputation —with Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) and
John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)— as one of the first-rank portrait
Belfield
3
—
Beifield main house L^.; .ersity. Philadelphia, Penn.
painters of the colonial and early federal periods of American history.

Peak's love of Beifield, though, was a natural extension of his character
this was a place where he could fully use all his artistic and scientific talents,
where he could put to work every aspect of his inquiring, imaginative and
supremely practical mind. In the 1980s, The Philadelphia Inquirer referred
to Charles Willson Peale as "Second only to Benjamin Franklin as
Philadelphia's 18th-century Renaissance man."
Yet Peak's beginnings had been less than auspicious. His father, Charles
Peale, had come to the colonies in 1735 as a prisoner —
he had been await-
ing execution on embezzlement charges in England when his sentence was
commuted to banishment to the New World. There he would be free to
start a new life, home to England. He initially
but he could never return
chose the colony of Virginia but soon found work as an instructor in
Annapolis, Maryland. There, he met a congenial young widow, Margaret
Triggs Matthews, whom he married shortly afterward. Peale and his bride
then moved to Centrevilk in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, across the

4
Chesapeake Bay, where he found another teaching position. There, on April
15, 1741, Charles Willson Peale was born.
The boy's father never told his family about his dark past, and, though
he always had expensive tastes and spent more than he earned, he worked
—
hard to support his family possibly too hard. He died suddenly when he
was only 41 and young Charles was 11, leaving five children and their
mother without an income. Charles's mother, Margaret, moved her family
back to Annapolis and took in needlework and dressmaking to earn money.
Little Charly, fascinated by the finery of the women who came and went in
Annapolis, began sketching styles for his mother. For years the boy had
believed that the estate of a rich relative in the British Isles would one day
make him wealthy, but his mother never believed in the mythical family
riches that her husband had had pipe dreams about. So she undertook the
task of finding a trade for Charly. At 12, he began an apprenticeship with a
saddlery, where he learned useful skills in leather making, woodworking
and buckle making. Having a natural talent for acquiring skills, he applied
himself diligently and also learned metalworking and silversmithing.
His master was so pleased that he gave Charly the chance to hire himself
out for extra money. Delighted, Charles saved his money and bought a
watch, took it apart and was dismayed when he back
couldn't put it
together. But with the help of a friendly watchmaker, he was soon on his
way to understanding the workings of watches, as well. Over the years,
Peale explored a wide range of interests including archaeology, cabinet-
making, dentistry, lens grinding and taxidermy.
At the time, everyone recognized painting as a craft, or trade, much like
the other skills that Peale had learned. Painters were the photographers of
their day. Good painters could make a healthy living, and a highly success-
ful painter could achieve significant wealth and stature. Peale soon decided
that he wanted to be a painter, and he set about learning this craft, too.
Peale first studied painting under John Hesselius, with whom he began
the same process as he had before: observe, copy and attempt to surpass the
best models. Above all, learn by doing. This approach proved to be both
Peale's strength and his weakness as a painter. He developed steadily dur-
ing his long lifetime, but his work was uneven, as it is with most painters
who paint such a large number of works. Often he did his best work when
he knew the subject well, as for example when he painted members of his
Belfield
5
own family or friends. (As it happened, many of his friends figured promi-
nently in the early years of American history.) But when Peale painted
under pressure, he worked more mechanically, and his painting tended to
be more contrived and stiff, failing to evoke the subtle feeling and nuances
of which he was capable.
At the age of 24, Peale journeyed to Boston, where he studied under the
well-known artist John Singleton Copley. By 1767, Peale knew that he
needed further technical instruction, and he left for England, as did many
aspiring artists of that time. There he spent two years studying with another
American painter, Benjamin West (1738-1820).
Once were finished, Peale returned to Philadelphia, where the
his studies
colonists had begun to clamor for independence. A fervent believer in the
patriots' cause, Peale joined the Continental Army at the outbreak of the
Revolutionary War, in which he served from 1776 to 1779. By day, he
marched with his compatriots, fighting in the battles of Trenton, Princeton
and Germantown. During the long nights, he painted oil portraits of those
leading the troops —
including General George Washington and miniature —
portraits of the soldiers, often selling them to his subjects. Peale joined the
Pennsylvania Assembly, but after the war ended in 1781, he resigned from
politics and returned to his painting.
During the 1780s, though, demand for portraits had begun to fall off,
and Peale began looking for ways to augment his income. In 1782, he
opened a portrait gallery in his home in Philadelphia in hopes that he might
be able to increase sales. By 1787, he had also founded a museum there,
combined with items from his portrait gallery, all of which he later installed
in Independence Hall (where visitors can still see his work displayed). His
gallery included not only portraits but also Native American artifacts and
minerals, as well as specimens —representatives of indigenous species, pre-
served through taxidermy, and displayed in scenic dioramas depicting their
natural settings. It was the museum established in America, and the
first
first to exhibit animals in this —

way a vivid and informative method of dis-
play still used by museums of natural history. In addition, Peale helped
establish the country's first public art exhibition in Philadelphia in 1794,
and in 1805 he helped found the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
By this time, Peale had developed remarkable painting techniques. His
life-size painting of two of his sons on their way up a spiral staircase. The

6
Staircase Group: Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay Peale / (1795), looked strik-
ingly real. According to Rembrandt Peale, when George Washington visited
one day in 1797, he "bowed politely to the painted figures which he after-
wards acknowledged he thought were living persons."
By 1810, when he bought Belfield, Peale was ready for a change. Here he
created another kind of museum, a museum of aesthetic planting and archi-
tectural experiments, a sanctuary for meditation and reflection. He built
outbuildings and shaped landscapes incessantly during the 10 years that he
lived there —planting a garden on the south side of the house; installing a
system of drains to prevent erosion; extending the path from the front door
beyond the sun wind down among flower beds and fruit trees, to the
dial to
summer houses, fountain and pool. Near the pool, he found a little cave
that delighted him, writing in his notes: "A spring was discovered in the
course of this work, and, digging back into the hillside and covering it over
with an arch of stone, a romantic cave produced, from which the water
flowed out into a garden pool."
Visitors can still see the cave, intact under the coffee tree, thanks to its
brick reinforcement. Near the cave, the outline and stone foundation of the
greenhouse also remain. You can wander in the boxwood maze that Peale
planted and visit the simple shelter he called a summer house built in "the
Chinese taste, dedicated to meditation."
Here you can imagine Peale seated on one of the seats beneath the wide,
flat roof, one eyebrow cocked, his piercing blue eyes trained on some deli-
cate aspect of nature, pondering, as he wrote in his autobiography:
I find equal pleasure in seeking for an acquaintance with those little ani-
mals whose life, perhaps, is spent on a single leaf, or at most on a single
bush. It is diverting to watch a flower as you approach and see the little
being watching you. It turns around a twig or part of a flower to avoid
your sight, and in an instant drawing in its legs rolls off, sometimes
falling from leaf to leaf to get passage to the ground.
In an illustrated letter to his son Rembrandt, who was away studying in

Paris, Peale described and sketched Belfield in delightful detail —the curving
road past a lush, open meadow, the white, rough-cast tenant's (or care-
taker's) house set in a turn in the road and the red roof of the manor (or
main) house just over the hill beyond. He has stocked a small fish pond on
Belfield
7
1 Barn with Windmill 8 Office of Public Affairs/ 14 Obelisk
2 Stable and Wagon Shed Carriage House =^15Cave
3 Elk Pen "9 Spring House *16 Greenhouse
4 Henhouse 10 Bath House 17 Garden Pool and Tool Shed
5 Landscape Garden 11 Security *18 Tenant House
"6Mansion House 12 Greenhouses 19 Pedestal of
7 Smokehouse 13 Summer House Memorable Events
with Bust of Washington *20 Chinese Summer House
Structure in Peale's time ^H Present day structures * Structure in Peale's time still present
Fence » * Stone Path ^^— Wall . Irrigation System
Ihe grounds of Belfield farm, showing the location of Peale's cave, greenhouse, tenant house,
Chinese summer house and boxwoods in relation to the main house and spring house, all of which
still can be seen today.
the property, Peale tells his son, with some 200 catfish carried in tubs from
the Schuylkill River.At one end of the house stone steps lead to the yard in
front of the garden. There, an abundance of hummingbirds hover around
hanging clumps of a flower that he calls the "crimosin bell." The garden is
rampant with plants of every kind — a variety of flowers along the wall of the

8
house, beneath the rose bushes —and nearby a shed to house shelves of bee-
hives, "conveniently situated to get their food from flowers of the Garden."
Between the carriage house and the main house, Peale describes a struc-
ture he calls a —
smokehouse covered with a creeping vine. He planned to
convert this into a two-story structure, which it is today.
Inside, Peale tells his son, he has taken out the partition between two
rooms on the first floor tomake a bigger one
— "because thought
I nec- it
essary to have one large room in a Country House" — and there he placed
many of his family portraits. The house has a rambling style, with a red
gambrel roof (with two slopes on each of two sides, the lower one steeper
than the upper slope), balcony and dormer windows (set upright in the
sloping roof), which Peale characterized as "rather old-fashioned in the
Germann stile." Today, Peale's manor houses La Salle University's presi-
dent's office and reception room, where Peale's painting room once was
on the first floor, and, on the second floor, in rooms Peale once used as
workshops, the university houses its institutional research and planning
offices.
In 1821, yellow fever was rampant and both Charles
in the countryside,
Willson and Hannah Peale fell ill. Hannah and the children insisted on call-
ing a doctor, and Hannah received the antidotes that the medical practi-
tioner prescribed, while Charles Willson refused all treatment. Much to
Charles's grief, however, Hannah died October 10, 1821. The children had
their father moved back to the house where he had established the museum
in Philadelphia. There, he slowly but resolutely recovered. He never again
had the heart to return to Belfield, remaining in Philadelphia to tend to the
museum and portrait gallery, which had become his main source of income.
Peale also returned to portraiture, executing a series of especially striking
self-portraits.
Five and a half years after his wife's death, Charles Willson Peale died
February 22, 1827, without again visiting Belfield —the farm that he had so
enjoyed and whose beauty he had helped shape.
Belfield
9
/&./S^/&./^/^.
A CLOSE-UP THE MASTODON
Perhaps Charles Willson Peale's greatest contribution to

new knowledge of natural history was his pursuit of the
mammoth. Occasionally, scientists of his time asked him to
sketch giant bones that they had found. The renowned sci-
David Rittenhouse had asked him to sketch an enor-

entist
mous molar Rittenhouse had found on the upper
Susquehanna River, and the drawing was published in 1786 in Columbian
Magazine. Based on the uncovering of those huge remains, scientists con-
cluded that a very large creature had once lived along the Atlantic Coast,
but no one had ever found a complete skeleton. So no one could be sure
exactly what kind of creature it was. Peale was intrigued. In an 1801 med-
ical journal, Peale read a notice of some bones of a very large animal found
in New York State. He went immediately to the site and saw bones scat-
tered on the granary floor at the farm where they had been found. Peale
negotiated for these bones and for the right to dig for the rest. He obtained
a loan of $500 from a philosophical society and then used a pump powered
by a treadmill to lower the level of water in the pit in which the first bones
had been discovered. He found most of the missing bones. Then Peale went
looking in nearby areas, hoping to find the rest, and had a stroke of luck.
He found another nearly complete skeleton. Between the two, he and his
sons could easily reconstruct what was missing.
The importance of was overwhelming: they had located skele-
the find
—
tons of an animal that no one had ever seen living an animal now extinct.
The discovery challenged some of the most entrenched assumptions of bio-
logical science of the time, in particular the "great chain of being" theory.
This theory held that had existed from the initial creation, was con-
all life
nected in sequence, as if in a chain, and would remain so for eternity. To

firm believers in this theory, no new species had ever been made after the
creation, and none had ever become extinct —
because, according to the

io
theory, God created the chain of being perfectly at the beginning of time.
The science of paleontology (the study of prehistoric plant and animal life
through analysis of fossil remains) was abuzz, and the human imagination
received a giant jolt. Charles Willson Peale was at the center of all this
commotion, sending bone and correspondence to luminaries, such as

casts
the eminent naturalist Georges Cuvier, in France, as well as prominent nat-
uralists in Germany, England and the United States.
Â/ÂAAAAAA/VSvAA/5ÂA/gv/i|
PRESERVING IT FOR THE FUTURE
In 1826, after Hannah's death, Peale sold Belfield toWilliam Logan Fisher, who
gave the farm to his daughter Sarah when she married William Wister. La Salle
University bought part of the original 104 acres of Peak's Belfield for its main
Rear view of the main house at Belfield (Courtesy of La Salle University, Philadelphia, Penn )
Belfield
11*
campus in 1926, but the house and gardens, including 8 acres of property,
remained in the Wister family until they were purchased by La Salle University
in 1984. Since 1965, the house and gardens have been designated a National
Historic Landmark and the grounds (though not the interior of the buildings)
are open to the public, who are encouraged to take a self-guided tour. Today
Belfield serves as a memorial to Peak's inventive spirit, creativity and energetic,
optimistic approach to life —the embodiment of the celebration of reason and
science that played such a key part in this country's founding years.
The interiors of the buildings have been adapted for administrative use by the
university, but much research and work has been done to restore the exteriors,
as nearly as possible, to the Belfield of Peale's day. Research and reconstruction
of the original plantings, streams, ponds and outbuildings continue. The exteri-
ors of the mansion house, spring house and tenant house and the grounds, the
cave and part of the irrigation system also still remain much as they did in
Peale's time. Inside the gates, visitors can obtain a guidebook that correlates
sites on the self-guided tour with Peale's many sketches of his gardens.
Books about Charles Willson Peale
Briggs, Berta N. Charles Willson Peale: Artist and Patriot. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1952.
Richardson, Edgar P., Brooke Hindle, and Lillian B. Miller. Charles
Willson Peale and His World. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982.
Sellers, Charles Coleman. Charles Willson Peale: A Biography. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.
Related Places
Gilbert Stuart Birthplace

815 Gilbert Stuart Road
Saunderstown, RI 02874
(401)294-3001

12
Best known for his Boston Athenaeum portrait of George Washington (the
picture on the one-dollar bill), Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) was a contem-
porary of Charles Willson Peale and, like Peale, is considered one of
America's foremost portrait painters. At his birthplace, a Registered
National Historic Landmark, visitors can view examples of his works, as
well as an authentically restored and furnished 18th-century "working
man's" home. It is also the site of the first snuff mill in America.
Independence National Historic Park

313 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215) 597-8974
A 40-acre park in downtown Philadelphia that includes, among other his-

toric landmarks. Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence
was adopted and where the U.S. Constitution was drafted. Visitors can also
see paintings by Charles Willson Peale on display here.
Belfield
13
Orchard House
HOME OF THE ALCOTTS, A FAMILY OF WRITERS AND ARTISTS
Concord, Massachusetts
AT A GLANCE
Built: Manor house, 1675-1700; Tenant house, 1700-25
Home, 1858-78, Bronson Alcott, his wife,
of philosopher/writer/educator
Abigail May (d. and three of their four daughters; Anna Bronson,
1877)
writer Louisa May and artist Abigail May (known as May).
A 1 7th-18th century wood-frame manor (main) house and L-shaped tenant

(caretaker's) house, joined to form a larger dwelling, set back from the
road, surrounded by an apple orchard and shaded by elm trees.
Address:
The Orchard House
P. O. Box 343
Lexington Road
Concord, MA 01 742
(508) 369-4118
14
\n 1857, when Bronson Alcott purchased, with the help of friends, the 1 2 acres of
wooded land surrounding the place that he called Orchard House, the buildings
were old. dilapidated and neglected. He spent the following year preparing them
for his family, who greeted the prospect of a real home with delight. The Alcott
family remained therefor 20 years.
. . . He lets every old rafter and beam stay in its place, changed
old ovens and ash-holes into Saxon-arched alcoves, and added
a wash-woman's old shanty to the rear. The result is a house
full of queer nooks and corners, all manner of juttings in and
out. It seems as if the spirit of some old architect had brought it
from the middle ages and dropped it down in Concord.
—Author Lydia Maria Child, contemporary of the Alcott

family, after Bronson's remodeling
Depending v^hom you might have asked in New England in the mid-
1800s, Amos Bronson
was either a foolish and impractical
Alcott
dreamer or a determined and idealistic visionary. His career as
educator-philosopher took many ups and downs, and, always driven by
his ideals rather than a concern for income, his choices seemed odd to
some onlookers and heroic to others. But his decisions were always firmly
backed up by his family, which would become famous through his daugh-
ter Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women.
Born Connecticut in 1799, Bronson was a self-made philosopher,
in
schoolteacher and educator. He had little formal education himself but held
many strong beliefs about the process of education. His primary idea was
that it was a teacher's duty to bring out the best in each child —through the
child —rather than through adherence to books and rote learning.
strict
Working with each individual child was the key, he believed. Talk to him
or her, listen to what the child has to say, ask questions and answer them.
In short, encourage guided conversation both inside and outside the
Orchard House
15 4
Members of the Alcott family at Orchard House, ca. 1 863 (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott
Memorial Association)
classroom, and the child would blossom. It was an idea not easily accepted
in the rigid educational systems of the time, and as a result Alcott's career
as teacher and educator was a rocky one, leaving Alcott frequently without
a job and the Alcott family nearly poverty stricken much of the time.
Bronson obtained his first teaching position in Germantown,
Pennsylvania, where the Alcotts' first two children were born, Anna in 1831
and Louisa May in 1832 (portrayed as Meg and Jo in Little Women). In
1834, the family moved to Boston, where Bronson founded his most impor-
tant experimental school. Temple School. Here, their third child, Elizabeth
Sewall (Beth) was born in 1835. Temple School, with its progressive philos-
ophy, was initially welcomed in Boston, but an uproar ensued over the pub-
lication of Bronson's Conversations with Children on the Gospels, in which
he set forth ideas too radical for conservative Bostonians. Temple School
closed in 1839. Alcott opened a second school, but controversy over his deci-
sion to admit a black student forced him to close it, too. Philosopher Ralph

16 4
Waldo Emerson, one of Bronson's main defenders in this cause, convinced
the Alcotts to move to Concord in 1840. There the youngest daughter,
Abigail May, known as May (Amy in Little Women), was born that same
year.
But financial considerations forced the family back to Boston in 1848,
where Bronson taught and wrote. (During the course of his life, he published
six books and kept a journal totaling 61 volumes.) Boston was large enough
to provide teaching positions as well for the two oldest daughters, Anna and
Louisa May, who soon went to work to help support the family, while
Marmee (their mother's name both in fiction and real life) did missionary
work among poor families.
Bronson Alcott was 58 when he returned with his wife and three daughters
to Concord, Massachusetts in 1857 to take up residence in the house he called
Orchard House. Actually there were two structures, a manor house and an L-
shaped tenant building, which he had decided to join together to form one
house large enough for his family. Both buildings were old and needed a lot of
work, but Bronson was ready to settle down and he had many friends in
Concord —good friends such as Emerson and writer Henry David Thoreau,
who shared many of his unorthodox ideas about life, religion and education.
—
They would provide good company and conversation especially about phi-
—
losophy, art and religion aspects of life Bronson Alcott enjoyed the most.
Orchard House, and its 12 acres of woodland on the historic Lexington
Road in Concord, would remain the Alcott family home for many happy and
productive years. The gentle and quiet Elizabeth (born in 1835) did not move
there with them, however. Only a few months before the family moved into
Orchard House she had caught scarlet fever and died at the age of 22.
Today, the visitor to Orchard House can still feel the warmth of the family
and the time. Wandering through the house, the modern visitor can see, not only
all the traditional furnishing and style of the Victorian era, but also the unique
touch of this very special family in the atmosphere and contents of the house.
Everywhere the surroundings convey a feeling of quiet harmony and con-
templation. The kitchen, with its soapstone sink that Louisa is said to have
purchased and the drying rack for clothes designed by Bronson, was the
special domain of the mother of the family, Abigail May. Here most of the
housewares displayed belonged to the Alcotts, including Marmee's sugar
bowl, spice box, mortar and pestle. She was the heart of the household, well
Orchard House
17
educated and intelligent, a kind woman
with singular devotion to her hus-
band and daughters, always providing an intuitive wisdom in her guidance.
In December 1860, Louisa wrote in her journal, "All the philosophy in our
house is not in the study, a good deal is in the kitchen, where a fine old lady
thinks high thoughts and does good deeds while she cooks and scrubs."
The dining room at Orchard House evokes the spirit of family mealtime,
which, in keeping with Bronson's beliefs in the importance of family life,
was and discussion. The meals themselves were simple.

a place for sharing
A vegetarian, Bronson had introduced his family to a diet of whole wheat
bread, rough cereals and a wide variety of vegetables and fruits. The con-
versations, however, were rich and heavy, often about philosophy or litera-
ture or the simple pleasures of nature. Frequently, the daughters would read
aloud from the journals that they were encouraged to keep, sharing their
thoughts, observations and questions with one another.
would adjourn to the parlor, with its arched fire-
After dinner the family
place, decorative niches and inviting window seats, where visitors would
come to share the legendary Alcott conversation. Not all Alcott evenings
were serious though. Edward Emerson, son of writer and philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote of many lighthearted evenings:
There was a piano, by no means too good to use, and May, in kindest spir-
its would swoop to the stool, and all would fall to dancing, the mother
herself often joining us. Then, with or without voices we stood by the
. . .
piano and sang. . . Storytelling, games or impromptu dramatics might

.
follow and chestnuts and apples would often end the evening.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, secure in his own work and reputation, admired
and occasionally worried about Bronson Alcott. There were precious goods
on his shelves, he once said of Alcott's thoughts, but he had no show win-
—
dow. Because of this lack of a "show window" his inability to find a long-
term suitable job where his unique talents would be appreciated Bronson —
Alcott had spent most of his life in near poverty. For that reason, his daugh-
ter Louisa would deem it her duty to help out with the family finances.
Curious, strong-minded, and intelligent, Louisa May Alcott, like her sis-
ters, had received a strong sense of social commitment and family ties from
her mother and a solid intellectual education from her father and his
friends. During the Alcott family's stays in Concord, she had spent many

18
Map of Concord, showing Orchard
House on Lexington Road, Emerson's
House nearby, writer and philosopher
Henry David Thoreau's cabin site on
Walden Pond, and other historic sites.
To the northwest of Orchard House.

on Sleepy Hollow Cemetery's Authors'
Ridge, lie the gravesites of the Alcotts.
Emerson. Thoreau, Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Margaret Sidney.
Concord
1 Orchard House
2 The Wayside
3 Emerson House
4 The Manse
5 Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
6 Town Center
7 Walden Pond,
site of Thoreau's cabin
Orchard House
19 4
—
hours browsing in Emerson's library, reading the works of Shakespeare,

Dante, Carlyle and Goethe. She had roamed the woods around Walden
Pond with Henry David Thoreau and hstened to his thoughts on society
and nature. She had thought for a while that she might hke to be an actress,
but in such heady intellectual surroundings she soon turned to literature as
a means to express her thoughts and feelings. Like her personal teachers
—
her father, Emerson and Thoreau she also had a strong individualistic
streak. She was determined to do whatever it was that she wanted —
and to
do it well. "I will make a battering ram of my head and make a way through
this rough and tumble world," she once wrote.
The simple decor of Louisa's room in Orchard House, the bookcase,

round table, chair, inkwell and writing desk, tell much about her straight-
forward and determined personality. It was here she did most of her writ-
ing and worrying about her family's welfare. She wrote her first book.
Flower Fables, when she was only 16, and she wrote continually after that.
Little money came from her early attempts at writing, and so she also took
odd jobs to help keep the family fed and sheltered. In the years before mov-
ing into Orchard House, Louisa had worked at various times as a gov-
erness, housemaid and seamstress. She had lived alone in boardinghouses
while sending money home to the family and had spent a year touring
Europe as a wealthy lady's traveling companion. Unlike Jo in the closely
autobiographical Little Women, Louisa did not wait at home while her
father served during the Civil War. Instead, she was the one who served,
working as a nurse in a Union hospital until illness forced her to return
home. She published her letters about the experience in Hospital Sketches
(1863). By the mid-1860s, Louisa was beginning to earn more money for
the family by churning out a number of adventure stories and gothic tales,
which she published under an assumed name.
While Louisa worked away at her writing, Bronson continued to
exchange thoughts and ideas with Emerson, Thoreau and many others of
New England's philosophical and educational thinkers. When not convers-
ing, he spent his time reading and thinking in the study at Orchard House.
Today, the room still reflects his perpetually open and optimistic nature,
retaining much of the atmosphere of his time.
"If in Emerson's study perpetual twilight reigns," a visitor to Orchard
House once wrote, "in Alcott's it is always noon. The great sun shines in it

20
Il
Louisa Mai/ hkoit at her desk (Concord Free Public Library)
all day, the great fireplace roars, and the warm crimson hangings temper
the sunlight and reflect the firelight. Quaint mottoes and pictures hang on
the walls."
Those words sum up, not only Bronson's study, but the very nature of
Orchard House, as it was in the 1800s and as it stands today. It is a home
in which the Alcott spirit can still be felt, not only in the study, dining room.
Orchard House
21
parlor and kitchen, but in the more intimate surroundings of the bedrooms
of Bronson and Abigail, and of all the Alcott daughters. This was a spirit of
family, love and optimism, perhaps best captured in one of Louisa's journal
entries as she described the return of her father from a lecture tour:
In February Father came home. Paid his way A dramatic

but no more.
scene when he We were warned by hearing the bell.
arrived in the night.
Mother flew down, crying, "My husband!" We rushed after, and . . .
embraced the half-frozen wanderer who came in hungry, tired, cold, and
disappointed, but smiling bravely and as serene as ever. We fed and
warmed and brooded over him, longing to ask if he had made any
money; but no one did til little May said, "Well, did people pay
. . .
you?" Then, with a queer look, he opened his pocket-book and showed
one dollar, saying with a smile that made our eyes fill, "Only that! My
overcoat was stolen, and I had to buy a shawl. Many promises were not
kept, and traveling is costly; but I have opened the way, and another
year shall do better."
I shall never forget how beautifully mother answered him with a . . .
beaming face she kissed him saying, "I call that doing very well. Since
you are safely home dear, we don't ask anything more."
Success would eventually come to the family. First, with the publica-
tion of Louisa's best-selling Little Women in 1868-69. Then, for
Bronson, with the founding of his Concord School of Philosophy, housed
in Fiillside Chapel, and designed by Bronson himself on the slope behind
Orchard House in 1879. Here, each summer for nine years, hundreds of
visitors, studentsand teachers would arrive to discuss, learn and carry
away many of Bronson's ideas about philosophy, life and education. For
the Alcotts, though, success was always there, in the warmth of Orchard
House, and the knowledge that each was "safely home," no matter where
they might be, in the warmth and support of all the members of a loving
and remarkable family.

22
/&v/8vS^/&./S^/
A CLOSE-UP THE SELF-PORTRAIT IN MAY'S ROOM
Portrayed in Little Women as Amy, May Alcott was even in

her childhood more interested in art than in Hterature or phi-
losophy. Unlike the plain-spoken and plain-living Louisa, her
sister. May
had a touch of the aristocratic in her character.
Although she was warm and affectionate and cared greatly
for her family, she always longed for something finer than the
simple life at Orchard House.
After studying art in Boston, May finally had her chance to go to Europe
when the success of Little Woman gave the family enough money for
Louisa and May to visit France, England, Italy and Switzerland. In
1873-74, May again visited Europe, this time to study art, and soon her
watercolor works were much in demand.
Although was always a friendly rivalry between May and
close, there
Louisa. After one of her still lifes was accepted for display by the Paris Salon
in 1877, she wrote, "Who would have imagined such good fortune and so
strong a proof that Lu ILouisa] does not monopolize the Alcott talent."
On one of her later trips abroad. May met and married Ernest
Nieriker, a young Swiss businessman and musician, and settled in a sub-
urb of Paris to live what May wrote would be "an ideal life painting,
."
—
music, love. . .
Unfortunately, that life was to be cut short. Six weeks after giving birth
to her first child, a daughter she named Louisa May Nieriker, May died in
France in 1879. On her deathbed she requested that her daughter, nick-
named Lulu, be sent to America to live with Louisa. In September 1880, the
child arrived, as Louisa said, a "very precious legacy." She would remain
with and delight the Alcott family for nine years until the deaths of both
Louisa and Bronson in March of 1888.
Returning to Europe to live with her father. Lulu led a long, productive
life, dying in 1975 at the age of 96. In later years, she often spoke of happy
Orchard House
23
May's room (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association, © Herbert K. Barnett)
days at Concord and her beloved Aunt Weedy as she called Louisa. Her
grandchildren still live in Europe and retain close ties wîth Orchard House.
Â/Sv/S^/8v/SvAAAAAAAAAA/SvAy;j
Louisa May Alcott suffered a rapid deterioration of health and died at age
55 in March 1888, four days after the death of her 88-year-old father.
Classes at the Concord School of Philosophy ended in July of that year,
and the house was sold to William Torrey Harris. In 1900, Orchard House
was bought from Harris by Harriet Lothrop, better known as the chil-
dren's author Margaret Sidney. In 1911, the Louisa May Alcott Memorial
Association was formed.

24
Today, Orchard House is a busy site, not only as a memorial and
museum, but also as an active education center, offering narrated tours, liv-
ing history programs, workshops and lectures. In 1976, Bronson Alcott's
School of Philosophy wâs also reopened. Each summer the school hosts a
conversational series with lectures on history, literature and philosophy.
EXPLORING FURTHER
Books by Louisa May and Bronson Alcott
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Boston:
Little, Brown & Co., 1994.
. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Daniel

Shealy, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
Books about the Alcotts
Burke, Kathleen. Louisa May Alcott (American Women of Achievement)

New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Delamar, G. T. Louisa May Alcott and "Little Women". Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Co., 1990.
Elbert, S. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American
Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Shepard, Odell. Peddler's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. 1937.
Reprinted, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood PubUshing Group, 1968.
Related Places
The Ralph Waldo Emerson Home

Lexington Road and Cambridge Turnpike
Concord, MA 01742
(508) 369-2236
Buih 1835, Emerson lived here from 1835 until his death
in m 1882. The
house features bookcases built on rollers. A National Historic Site (1962).
Orchard House
25
The Old Manse
Monument Street
Concord, MA
01742
(508) 369-3909
This clapboard dwelling was built ca. 1749 by Ralph Waldo Emerson's
grandfather and was the residence of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Nathaniel Hawthorne at different times. A National Historic Site (1962).
The Wayside "Home of Authors"

455 Lexington Road
Concord, MA 01742
(508) 369-6975
Originally built in 1724, this house was occupied by three acclaimed 19th-
century authors and their families: Harriet Lothrop ("Five Little Peppers"
series), Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Walden Pond State Reservation

South of Concord on MA 126
Concord, MA 01742
(508) 369-3254
An 8,585-acre park containing Walden Pond and a replica of Thoreau's

cabin. Interpretive programs help bring the historical and literary sig-
nificance to life. A 1-mile hike takes visitors to the site of the original
cabin.

26
Twain House
HOME OF AUTHOR-HUMORIST MARK TWAIN
Hartford, Connecticut
AT A GLANCE
Built: 1873-74
Home of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) from 1874 to 1891
Three-story brick structure, with highlights painted red and black,

large wooden porch (or "ombra"), 19 rooms and 5 baths. Original cost:
$3 ,000 for the 5-acre parcel of land; $70,000 for the house;
1
and $2 1 ,000 for furniture.
Address:
The Mark Twain Memorial

351 Farmington Avenue
Hartford, CT06I05
(860)493-6411
27
The house Mark Twain built in Hartford, Connecticut, represented everything his
own background did not: grace, opulence and respectability, set in an atmosphere
of visual warmth and rich beauty.
To us, our house was not unsentient matter —

it had a heart, and a
soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals, and solicitudes, and deep
sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its
grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an
absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent wel-
—
come and we could not enter it unmoved.
—Mark Twain, 1896
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) — free spirited, untamed and

restless —grew up poor in Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi
where he scrambled for a living as an itinerant printer, occa-
River,
sional newspaper reporter, and a steamboat pilot. From there, he journeyed
west to San Francisco to earn his fortune as a journalist and, later, as a gold
miner. His writing panned out better than his gold mining. Gifted with a
sardonic sense of humor, an ear for colorful language and a love of back-
woods and frontier tales, he soon built a reputation as a humorist and lec-
turer. By 1873, when he arrived to build his house in the stately old town of
Hartford, Connecticut, he had acquired his pen name Mark Twain and — —
wide renown as a writer.
For Twain, the prospect of living in Hartford meant that he had, at last,
achieved success. He fell in love with the place. "I think that this is the best
builtand the handsomest town I have ever seen," he wrote.
Once built. Twain House was everything a home should be, designed
exactly to the specifications that he and his wife, Livy, gave the architect.
Today, walking through its spacious, comfortable rooms or studying its
striking exterior is like stepping through a time portal into the era now
known as the Gilded Age —the age that Twain helped name as both enthu-
LlTERATURE AND THE ARTS
28
siastic participant and ardent critic. In these years following the end of the
Civil War in 1865, rapid industrialization encouraged risky financial spec-
ulation, and everyone seemed caught up in the frenzy of lavish spending and
ostentatious wealth. Twain himself always had a restless eagerness for "get-
rich-quick" schemes and relished the opulent mode of the era. His enthusi-
asm shows in every detail of Twain House.
Mark and Livy chose to set their house in the Nook Farm area — a 100-
acre, heavily wooded region that was already home to the intellectual elite
The Clemens (Mark Twain] family on the porch of the Hartford house-. Clara (left). Livy, \ean,
Sam and Susy. The dog's name is Hash. (Mark Twain Memorial, Hartford. Conn )
Twain House
29
of Hartford, including Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom's
Cabin), who hved next door, and Charles Dudley Warner (editor of the
Hartford Courant and Harper's Magazine), with whom Twain would later
collaborate on The Gilded Age, their novel satirizing the foibles of those
caught up in the get-and-spend frenzy. These neighbors would join many
others as frequent guests of the Clemens family, who built their home for
hospitality, entertaining and friendship.
From the outside, Twain House presents a spectacle both opulent and
homey. Twain's good friend, the novelist and critic William Dean Howells,
described it best: "As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever Hved,
so his house was unlike any other house ever built." At first glance, you may
be struck by a unique "difference" that's difficult to pin down. Only upon
further observation does the secret of the house come fully into view. Among
the house's well-integrated decks, porches and pillars. Twain has somehow
captured the spirit of his beloved Mississippi River steamboats and shaped it
into this stately, rambling structure —including a large balcony on the third
floor resembling a pilothouse. You can almost see writer Mark Twain or
steamboat captain Samuel Clemens standing at the rail, pipe or cigar in
hand, looking out for visitors or obstacles approaching from below.
Entering the front door today, the visitor knows that inside he or she will
find both Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, writer, adventurer, humorist
and philosopher, still alive in the spirit of the place —a place so permeated
with the memory of the man that one can almost smell the pungency of his
pipe or hear the sound of his voice echoing through the halls.
In the years between 1874 and 1891, many household guests stepped
through that front door and into the great entrance hall with its dark-wood
walls and intricately paneled ceilings. Like the rest of the house, it shows the
influence of the team of decorators from Hartford —the Associated
Artists —that Twain hired 1881 to make over the interior of the house.
in
Visitors find themselves surrounded by rich wood panels decorated with
elegant patterns stenciled in silver, and dark red painted walls and ceiling,
trimmed in dark blue patterns that echo the style of American Indian tex-
tiles. On the right, a massive fireplace welcomes the visitor's eye with its
carved-wood panels. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's son-in-law,

George P. Lathrop, described Twain House as "a charming haunt with . . .
its wide hall, finished in dark wood under a paneled ceiling, and full of easy-
LlTERATURE AND THE ARTS

30
Twain House, the Hartford residence of Mark Twain {Samuel Langhorne Clemens), 1874-91
(The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Conn.)
chairs, rugs, cushions, and carved furniture that instantly invite the guest to
lounge in front of the big fire-place."
During the years that Twain and comfortable
lived in this splendid
Hartford house, he wrote many of his most famous works including The —
Adventures of Tom Sawyer; the highly acclaimed, influential, and much-
maligned work. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and Life on the
Mississippi. Having left the rough frontier life of Missouri far behind him,
—
he was free in the comfort of Hartford and his nearby summer residence
in Elmira, New York —
to return there in his imagination. It was a "rough-
and-ready" imagination, and Twain always remained the plain-spoken and
"homey" backwoods humorist, even in sedate Hartford. In appearance,
too, he was just as colorful as any of his characters were, with his shock of
reddish (and later white) hair, drooping mustache and ever-present pipe or
cigar. He was too colorful, uneducated, and "backwoodsy," some critics
thought, to be taken seriously. Others, though, recognized something
Twain House
31
—
special in —
Twain a perceptiveness that elevated his work above his com-
petitors and demanded recognition for the uncanny way he captured the
essential American character and experience.
The American character and experience as seen by Mark Twain, though,
did not always meet the approval of conservative and moralizing critics. His
characters, they complained, were often crude, illiterate and vulgar. Books,
they maintained, should teach moral lessons about life, and Twain's, they
—
thought, did anything but particularly in the case of Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. The story follows the colorful and comic adventures and
misadventures of young Huck, a wild-spirited boy who runs away from
home in an effort to escape the restrictions of "civilization." As he travels
on a raft down the Mississippi with a runaway slave named Jim, he learns
more about loyalty and friendship than many "civilized" people learn in a
lifetime. But many readers missed the positive lessons of the book and saw
only a boy who lied, cheated, stole and swore, all apparently without
remorse or regret. Or, as the New York World newspaper described Huck
at the time of the book's publication in 1885, "A Wretchedly low, vulgar,
sneaking and lying country boy." Twain's use of realistic language and
dialect in Huck Finn's first-person account of his adventures — a real break-
through in —
American literature also offended many readers at the time,
who felt this crude, ungrammatical and "inelegant" speech had no place in
a novel.
Today, critics consider Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain's master-
piece. (Such later eminent admirers as authors T. S. Eliot and William
Faulkner praised the book highly, and Ernest Hemingway stated flatly that
"... all modern American Literature comes from one book Huckleberry
Finn.'') But Adventures of Huckleberry Finn still remains controversial and
is still occasionally banned from school and public libraries by self-
appointed arbitrators of public taste, both from the right and the left of the
political spectrum.
Despite the controversy over Huck Finn., Twain's books sold well and
brought him many admirers during his years in Hartford. These were the
happiest and most creatively productive years of his life. And, although he
often complained that it was difficult to get his work done with so many vis-
itorsand admirers dropping in all the time, he enjoyed the fame and the com-
pany. Writing two years after Twain's death, his biographer Albert Bigelow

32
Paine described the comings and goings at Twain House: "Dinner parties
were frequent and they were Hkely to be briUiant affairs. The best minds, the
brightest wits gathered around Mark Twain's table." The guests ranged
from miUtary masters such as General Philip Henry Sheridan and General
William Tecumseh Sherman to the elite of the New England literary set.
It's easy to imagine these guests being ushered into the drawing room
with its delicately stenciled, salmon-colored walls, Oriental rugs, bay win-
dow and grand piano —or the library —with its comfortable overstuffed
chairs, carved bookcases teeming with books and roaring fireplace. At one
end of the library, a semicircular conservatory, originally designed by
Harriet Beecher Stowe, overflowed with broad-leafed plants and flowering
vines. This charming feature of the house formed the backdrop for many a
play staged by the Clemens family in their home, with guests seated in the
library and the adjoining dining room.
The dining room walls of deep red and gold provided the setting for
Twain's dinners which Mark and Livy always dressed formally, guests
(for
or no guests), served by George, the butler (who arrived one day to wash
windows, took to Twain's sense of humor and stayed for 18 years). Here
there was plenty of room for Twain to pace —
walking, talking and telling
yarns, his napkin waving in the air to illustrate his point —
as his guests
dined and George leaned against a doorjamb, chuckling at the fun.
The house contains a guest room on every floor, each with an adjoining
bathroom, but special guests got the downstairs guest room, described by
Howells as "a royal chamber." There, a four-poster bed, tiled fireplace and
private dressing room would greet the tired guest, after, as Howells wrote,
"we had sat up late, [Twain] smoking the last of his innumerable cigars,
and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
the waters under the earth."
Twain delighted in inventions —he thought up and patented several him-
self, including a vest buckle and a self-pasting scrapbook. He delighted in
showing guests the latest gadgets that he had in his house, such as tubes for
calling up servants, coachman and so on. "There's one somewhere for the
police, I believe," he would say with a twinkle. And he was among the first
to use several new inventions of the day, including the fountain pen, the
typewriter and the telephone (which drove him crazy with its ringing).
Twain House
33
1
1 Hall
2 Guest Room
3 Conservatory
4 Library
17
T 18
5 Dining
6 Pantry
Room
1_ Third Floor
7 Kitchen
8 Servants' Hall
9 Drawing Room
[F-y
10 Bedroom (Mr. & Mrs. Clemens)
1 Bedroom (Clara & Jean
12 Bedroom (Susy) ^...
13 School Room -•^ p
14 Guest
15 Servants'
Room
Wing
r-ii I i-J — /J- - Second
S( Floor
11
16 Servants' Room -? 10
17 Billiard Room
18 Guest Room
19TheOmbra
>. >•
MARK TWAIN HOUSE

HARTFORD
Floor plan of Twain House (Mark Twain Memorial, Hartford, Conn.)

34
On the second floor, Twain room on the
originally planned the large
southwest corner as his study, workroom. There, he thought, he
his literary
would write. But its bay window tempted him to survey the scenery and
watch the snow fall instead. A divan extending along two sides of a corner,
he told Lathrop, was a good idea, "but I found it was much more comfort-
able to lie there and smoke than to stay at my desk." So the study became
instead the schoolroom for the children Susy, Clara and Jean —
and Twain —
placed his desk facing away from the view in the billiard room upstairs.
Mornings usually began for Mark Twain at 11:00 A.M. downstairs with
a breakfast of steak and a cup of hot coffee, after which he would head
upstairs to the billiard room on the top floor, where he would work or —
play billiards. In any case, he left instructions with the housekeeper, Katy
Leary, not to let anyone disturb him for any reason. And there he would
remain until 4:30 P.M., when he came down to get ready for dinner.
The billiard room was Twain's hideout. "This room," wrote a reporter
from the New York World,
is a treat. A big billiard table with black and gold legs stands in the middle
of it. Its windows look to the westward over a and noisy brook.
festive . . .
It is a delightful spot altogether, just the place for hard work. Mark
Twain's desk stands in the southern corner piled with business papers.
The place was (and still is) filled with clutter. The shelves of books were
filled with a wide range of readings —
the United States Newspaper
Directory, the Old Testament and trivial popular books would rub bindings
with major literary works. On the walls hung portraits of Johannes
Gutenberg and the originals of several engravings, along with the portrait
of Prudence Crandall, who, as Twain would explain, taught school nearby
in 1833 and admitted two African-American girls. "This was one of the ear-
liest acts that started the Abolition controversy," Twain once remarked.
"The parents of her pupils made a great row about her action, but the black
girls kept on in her school."
Katy Leary described the billiard room as a housekeeping keep-out

zone: "Mr. Clemens had a table there, you know, and Mrs. Clemens
. . .
used to go up and dust that table every morning and arrange his manu-
script and writing, if he didn't arrange it himself, which he sometimes used
to do. . Nobody was allowed to touch them manuscripts besides Mrs.
. .
Twain House
35
Clemens." In fact, Twain typically heaped stacks of books relating to his
subject on the huge billiard table, upholstered the walls with scraps of
paper penciled with notes, and from these saturated himself with knowl-
edge about his subject.
But he also used the billiard room for billiards: "Every Friday evening,"
wrote Paine, "or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered, and
played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was blue,
comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship."
The Hartford chapter of Twain's life came to an end in 1891, when he
and his family set out for Europe, not reahzing that they would never live at
Twain House again. While they were away, hard financial times began to
hit. By 1894, severe economic recession in the United States, along with
poor investment decisions (including an automated typesetting machine
that cost too much to build) and the collapse of his publishing house,
Charles L. Webster dc Co., forced Twain to close up the house in Hartford.
He set out again that year with Livy and Clara, this time on a worldwide
lecture tour, with Susy and Jean planning to join them at the end of the
tour, in England, where the family could live more economically. The tour
was a great success, and Mark and Livy had found a place to settle in
England, but the reunion would never take place. In 1896, just as the sisters
were about to set sail, Susy became ill with cerebral meningitis. Livy and
Clara booked passage home as soon as they heard, but they were too late.
Two days after his wife and daughter set sail for home. Twain received a
telegram: Susy was dead, and he could do nothing even to notify Clara and
Livy or comfort them. Alone in London, Twain was devastated.
Susy's death was the first in a series of severe emotional losses at the end
of Twain's life. He had always been close to his family and had doted on his
daughters, showering them with gifts, stories and attention. Now, one by
one he began to lose those closest to him. In 1903, Twain finally had to sell
the house in Hartford, and Livy died a year later in Florence, Italy. In 1908,
Twain built a house he named Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut, hoping
it would be a place where he could recover from his sorrows. The following
year, ironically, his daughter Jeandrowned there in her bathtub, apparently

during an epileptic seizure. She was 29. Only Clara, now living in Germany,
—
remained of his family that tight-knit little group that had lived and
laughed together at the house in Hartford.

36
Greatly saddened, Samuel Langhorne Clemens died April 21, 1910, at
Stormfield. Worn out and exhausted he had confided to his friend Albert
Bigelow Paine only a year before, "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835.
It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the
greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go with Halley's comet." He
was not disappointed. On April 20, 1910 —the night before his death
Halley's comet returned to the Earth's skies.
A^vSvW^/
A CLOSE-UP THE LIBRARY FIREPLACE
The library's rare combination of elegance and comfort at

Twain House made it a place where friends sat and talked far
into the night, and where the Clemens children gathered at
their father's knee. Friends and family would group around
the fire to listen as Twain read aloud, and the fireplace
inscribed with the motto, "The ornament of a house is the
friends that frequent it" —
became a symbol of his fun-loving hospitality.
The ornately carved wooden overmantel was among Twain's favorite
acquisitions, purchased in Scotland, and originally intended for the dining
room at Ayton The overmantel still bears the family crests of the
Castle.
Mitchell-Innes family, for whom it was designed. Twain removed the orig-
inal date, 1869, and proudly added the date of his own house, 1874.
Bookcases flank the fireplace on either side, joining the mantelpiece
and creating an extensive display shelf for a long row of ornaments,
which became part of an elaborate children's game in which Twain
played the central role — one that made use of his considerable talents as
storyteller and humorist. As Twain described this game in his autobiog-
raphy:
At one end of the procession was a framed oil painting of a cat's head;
at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life size, called
Twain House
37
The library fireplace (The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Lc

38
Emmeline, an impressionist water-color. Between the one picture and
the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-a-brac things already
mentioned, also an oil painting by Elihu Vedder, 'The Young Medusa.'
Every now and then the children required me to construct a romance
—
always impromptu not a moment's preparation permitted and into —
that romance I had to get all and the three pictures. I
that bric-a-brac
had to start always with the cat and finish with Emmeline. I was never
allowed the refreshment of a change, end for end. It was not permissible
to introduce a bric-a-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the
procession.
Twain rescued the mantel before selling the house in 1903, and in 1908,
two years before his death, it was placed in the library in Stormfield, his
house in Redding, Connecticut. In 1958, restorationists returned the man-

tel to its original place in Twain House in Hartford.
ÂAA/^vavA/?w^/\AAAAAy^/^
During the year 1896-97, Mark Twain rented the house in Hartford to
John Calvin Day. Later, Day's daughter, Katharine Seymour Day, would
become a key player in the campaign to establish it as a memorial. The pres-
ident of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, Richard M. Bissell, bought
the house from Twain in 1903, and his family lived there until 1917, then
rented the place to the Kingswood School, a private school for boys. The
school remained there for five years, until it moved to West Hartford. At
that time, in 1922, the house was sold again. For a while, it was used as a
warehouse, and then later subdivided into apartments.
Meanwhile, several civic organizations set about raising funds to buy the
house and establish it as a memorial to Mark Twain. Finally, success came
when the Mark Twain Memorial Committee, headed by Katharine Day,
bought the house in 1929. The State of Connecticut chartered it as a memo-
rial on April 29 of that and on December 29, 1962,
year, it was estabUshed
as a National Historic Landmark.
Twain House
39
EXPLORING FURTHER
Books by Mark Twain
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's
Comrade) Edited by Walter Blair and Victor Fischer. Berkeley:
.
University of California Press, 1985.

. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Foreword and notes by John C.
Gerber; text established by Paul Baender. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980.
. Mark Twain's Autobiography. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924.
Twain Books on the Internet
Under the author name Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the Gutenberg Project
provides the full text on-line of several of Mark Twain's works, includ-
ing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Search on: Project Gutenberg.
Books about Mark Twain

Clemens, Clara. My Father, Mark Twain. New York: Harper and Brothers,
1931.
Kaplin, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1966.
Lauber, John. The Inventions of Mark Twain: A Biography. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1990.
Meltzer, Milton. Mark Twain Himself: In Words and Pictures. New York:
Bonanza Books, 1960.
Related Place
Mark Twain Boyhood Home

208 Hill Street
Hannibal, MO 63401
(573) 221-9010
Extensively restored boyhood home of the author, a two-story white frame
house in which the Clemens family lived in the 1840s and 1850s. This small
Mississippi River port provided much of the setting for The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

40
Winslow Homer House
HOME AND STUDIO OF ARTIST WINSLOW HOMER
Prout's Neck, Maine
AT A GLANCE
Built: Begun ca. 1870
Studio home of Winslow Homer from 1884 to 1910
Former carriage house at the edge of the ocean, converted by artist

Winslow Homer to serve as his studio and summer home for the last 27
years of his life. Here the artist, noted for seascapes, could paint within
earshot of the ocean's crashing waves and could run out during storms to
witness the sea's power firsthand. It is in this studio that he did much of
his greatest work.
Address:
Winslow Homer Home and Studio
Winslow Homer Road
Prout's Neck, Maine
(207) 883-2249 (Doris Homer, open by appointment only)
41
—
\n the mid- 1880s, ^hlinslow Homer retreated to an isolated. Spartan artist's
studio perched on the rugged coast of Prout's Neck, Maine, within view of
sea waves that crashed against the shore only a few yards away. The studio
was rustic and rough, but it suited his purposes perfectly. He wanted time and
space to work, away from the clamoring crowds and the demands of friends
and admirers, and he began there a hermitlike existence that would continue for
the remaining 27 years of his life.
... do my own work. No other man or woman within half a

I
mile and four miles from the railroad and the P.O. This is the
only life in which I am permitted to mind my own business. I
suppose I am today the only man in New England who can do
it. I am perfectly happy and contented. . . .
—Winslow Homer, in a letter to a fellow artist, early 1900s
Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was in his late forties when he moved

to Prout's Neck and
him being contented and happy meant
to
spending his days painting in oil or watercolor. And it meant
tramping along the coast as he studied the ocean and the lives of nearby vil-
lagers who made their living from the sea. Once the sun went down, he
would pack up his easel and return to his studio and dwelling place, a con-
verted stable, and prepare a simple meal over the studio's big fireplace, work
on his stamp collection or write a few letters. Then he would turn in for a
night's sleep on a bed with a sturdy board placed beneath the mattress
since, he explained, he could never sleep well on a soft bed. It was a simple
existence and one that suited his pace well.

Today visitors to Homer's studio at Prout's Neck often find them-
selves as transfixed by the Maine coast as was Homer and may find —
themselves wishing that their lives could be so simple and complete.
Winslow and his brother Charles had bought the land on which his stu-
dio now stands in 1883. A large house, partially built, and a carriage house

42
came with was to finish the house, mak-
the acreage, and the brothers' idea
ing an investment in what they hoped would become both a successful sum-
—
mer resort like others down the beach and a home for their aging —
parents. And although their mother would live for only one year more after
moving in, their father would reside in Front's Neck during the summers
until his death in 1898. For Winslow Homer himself, the purchase at
Front's Neck would mark a dramatic turning point.
Born in Boston, February 24, 1836, Homer grew up there and began his
artistic career as a magazine illustrator after serving a two-year apprentice-
ship with a lithographer in the Boston area. Shortly after opening a small
studio in Boston, he began work as a regular contributor to Harper's
Magazine, a popular periodical of the era. Largely self-taught, his clear and
distinct drawing style soon made him a great favorite with the magazine's
Vînslow Homer's studio home (far left] at Prout's Neck. Maine, ca. 1884. On the right. The
Ark. summer home of Homer's father, Charles Savage Homer (Bowdoin College Museum of
Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of the Homer family)
Winslow Homer House

43
editors. In 1859, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, Homer moved
his studio to New York City, and the magazine sent him on assignment to
Washington, D.C., to sketch Abraham Lincoln's presidential inauguration.
When war broke out later in 1861, Harper's assigned him to Washington
again, as well as the battlefields in Virginia, as an artist-correspondent.
During this period, his interest turned toward oil painting, and he began to
replicate some of his war sketches on canvas. Painting in a realistic, objec-
tive and unsentimental style. Homer began to exhibit some of his painting
at the National Academy of Design in New York City.
While not all the critics were impressed. Homer was by then determined
to leave Harper's, give up his career as an and turn to painting
illustrator
full-time. Homer spent 1866-67 in France, but unlike many American
painters at that time, he felt he could learn little from the Europeans. He
recognized early in his career that he had a unique vision, and he took care
to avoid too much outside influence for fear that he might lose it. He devel-
oped his art primarily from instinct and from trial and error. As a result, his
work is in some respects technically naive, but his retention of his own
unique style gives his work a forthrightness that sets it apart and puts him
singularly in tune with American taste. However, two years, 1881-83,
spent in the English port town of Cullercoats near Newcastle did leave their
mark. There, in this small fishing village, he began to discover his interest in
the sea and the people who made their living from it.
When Homer returned to America in 1883, he left New York perma-
nently and prepared to move to Maine. By the time he settled in Front's
Neck in 1884, he knew that he had discovered his major subject. "If a man
wants to become an artist," he once remarked, "he should never look at
paintings." The sea and the elemental forces of human against nature
would now be the primary subjects of his paintings, both oil and water-
color. To study the sea, he recognized, one would not only have to live close
to it but also somehow feel it and become a part of it.
His first decision was to use the old two-room carriage house adjacent to
the newly finished house as his working studio and home. His second decision
was that his life had to become as simple and uncomplicated as possible, cut-
ting out all that would distract him from his work. As a young artist many had
thought him somewhat social, but when he found his subject he had also found
himself. To be alone with his work as much as possible, he had his studio

44
moved 40 yards away from the main house, fitting it out with a covered porch
so that he could sir and watch the sea. But he outfitted it with only the most
uncomfortable of furniture to discourage any visitors from staying too long.
Ironically, even though he and his brother had purchased the land in anticipa-
tion that Prout's Neck would one day become a summer resort, he dreaded the
summer visitors the most —going so far as to post a sign reading, "Snakes!
Mice!" along the path to the studio, hoping to discourage unwelcome guests.
Homer's him it was a necessity.
desire for privacy wasn't just a quirk; for
Interruptions destroyed his communion with the sea and his ability to
work. "Every condition must be favorable or I do not work and will not,"
he wrote to a friend he had known since his Civil War days. To another old
friend he wrote, "I don't want a lot of people nosing around my studio and
bothering me. I don't want to see them at all." Not surprisingly, the legend
of Winslow Homer, the gruff hermit painter of Prout's Neck, soon began to
grow along with his increasing fame. And the few strangers, aspiring young
painters or newspaper reporters who did manage to make contact often
came away with tales that reinforced the legend.
—
Much of the legend was true, and although his relations with the vil-
lagers were open and friendly because he admired them and their simple
ways of life and sometimes even invited the local butcher into his studio to
laze around while he worked —
he preferred to spend most of his time alone,
with his work and with the sea. "The damn pond," he would call it w^hen it
was quiet, but when the storms came and the waves broke wildly, he would
put on his boots and waterproof coat and race like a child to his favorite
— —
vantage points watching, studying, learning and later painting all that
he had seen, felt and understood. He learned to translate the movement and
power of stormy seas to the flat, still canvas in a way that seemed to make
it come alive. Whether he painted the rugged New England coast or the
smoother, bluer waters of the Carribean, where he sometimes wintered, he

succeeded in capturing every aspect —the salt spray, the fog, the movement
of the heaving waves, the ominous recklessness of its nature.
Winslow Homer stayed at Prout's Neck for the remaining 27 years of his
life, and during those years he produced some of his finest works, becoming
one of America's best-known painters. His most famous works including —

The Gulf Stream (1899), Eight Bells (1886) and Fog Warning {1SS5)— are still
studied and admired today, and a trip to the studio at Prout's Neck has
Winslow Homer House

45
Homer standing on the gallery of his studio, 1884 'Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick,
Maine, Gift of the Homer family)
become a pilgrimage for many who know and love his art. Visitors can view
the simple, Spartan space where Homer painted and can stand on the porch
and listen to the same crashing of the waves he listened to. A short walk to
nearby bluffs brings into view the rugged, powerful elements that he captured
so vividly in his art.
"My home here is very pleasant. I do not wish a better place," he once
wrote. And toward the end of his life, in a letter to his brother, he confided,
"There is some strange power that has some overlook on me and
certainly
directing my life. That I am in the right place there is no doubt about."
. . .
"All is lovely," he wrote, a month later, "outside my house and inside my

house and myself."
Although many of his later paintings of hunting or field scenes still con-
tained an occasional human most of his seascapes had by then aban-
figure,
doned any human element at all. Only in Driftwood (1909), his last, does a
—
human figure once more appear a small man at the bottom of the picture,
his back to the viewer and facing a raging sea.
Winslow Homer died on September 29, 1910. He was 74 years old.

46
A CLOSE-UP THE GULF STREAM
Painted late inWinslow Homer's life, in 1899, The Gulf Stream

remains one of his most famous and powerful paintings.
Although much of Homer's later work focuses on portraying
the elemental forces of nature, The Gulf Stream returns to one
of his earlier themes: the courageous human struggle against
nature's power and indifference. Dramatic and stark, this oil
painting depicts a man alone in dangerous, storm-tossed subtropical seas, his

boat crippled, with the mast only a broken stump and no rudder to guide with.
"Winslow Homer in his studio with The Gulf Stream (Bowdoin College Museum of Art,
Brunswick, Maine. Gift of the Homer family)
Winslow Homer House

47
Sharks circle menacingly. This is nature at its most grim and unbeatable, and
yet the man in The Gulf Stream is not defeated or resigned. He faces his almost
certain death with stoic courage and resilience.
Unclouded by sentimentality, Homer's work reflects an unflinching hon-

esty that continues to ring true even a century later. He knew what it was to
work long hours, as he had done during his apprenticeship. He had faced
hunger and death close at hand during his days with the Union troops.
After the war, during the period known as Reconstruction, he saw and
recorded the struggle of freed slaves to gain and hold the rights so long
forcibly denied them. In many ways, The Gulf Stream captures and conveys
all of this, both simply and powerfully.

Over the years since Winslow Homer's death, the Front's Neck peninsula
has changed little, preserved nearly as it was in his time by the Front's Neck
Association, a group of homeowners in the area. While the summer resorts
of Homer's day are now gone, fewer than 20 new houses have sprung up.
The sea can still be heard crashing against the rocks below Homer's studio,
and the landscape remains virtually unchanged. Winslow Homer's studio
stands as it did when the artist died, the exterior unaltered and the painting
room still much as it was during his lifetime. Still owned and managed by
members of the artist's family, the studio was established as a National
Historic Landmark on December 21, 1965 and is open in the summer only
to groups of six or more, by appointment. The house, which the Homers
called The Ark, has been sold and is privately owned.
EXPLORING FURTHER
Books about Winslow Homer
Beam, Fhilip C. Winslow Homer at Trout's Neck. Boston and Toronto:

Little, Brown and Company, 1966.

48
et al. Winslow Homer in the 1890s: Prout's Neck Observed. New
York: Hudson Hills Press, 1964.
Beneduce, Ann Keay. A Weekend with Winslow Horner^ New York: Rizzoli
International Publications, 1996.
Cooper, Helen A. Winslow Homer Watercolors. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1986.
The World of Winslow Homer. New York: Time Inc., 1966.
Flexner, James.
Goodrich, Lloyd. Winslow Homer. New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1973.
Related Places
Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Bowdoin College
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 725-3275
Has an extensive collection of photographs relating to Winslow Homer's

life, as well as several of his works.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

5th Avenue &: 82nd Street
New York, NY 10028
(212) 535-7710
Holdings include a large collection of works by Winslow Homer.
National Gallery of Art

4th & Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20565
(202) 737-4215
Has numerous works by Winslow Homer that can be viewed by the public.
Winslow Homer House

49
Aspet
HOME AND STUDIO OF SCULPTOR AUGUSTUS SAINT GAUDENS
Cornish, New Hampshire
AT A GLANCE
Built: ca. 1800
Summer residence of Augustus Saint Gaudens, from 1885 to 1900;

Year-round residence from 1900 to 1907
Originally called Muggins' Folly, a Federal-period tavern and inn that Saint
Gaudens converted into his residence in 1885. At the same time, he
converted a nearby barn into a studio, completely remodeling it in 1903.
Many most famous works (or copies

of the sculptor's of them) are on
permanent display at the studio.
Address:
Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site
RR 3. Box 73
Cornish, New Hampshire 03745
(603)675-2175
50
Saint Gaudens brought to sculpture a vibrant, heroic style that incorporated
movement and a sense of grandeur. To his life he brought energy and a love of
creation, and his home reflects that spirit.
There was hardly a week in all the time my father spent on this
place during twenty-two years that he did not have something

rebuilt or regraded to his intense enjoyment,
—Homer Saint Gaudens, son of Augustus
Augustus Saint Gaudens (1848-1907) was looking for a summer res-

idence in 1885 when he found the place known as Huggins' Folly
in Cornish, New Hampshire. He was determined to escape the hot
New York summer while working on his current project, the statue of
Abraham Lincoln for a park in Chicago. Built in about 1800, the place had
never done well as an inn or tavern, which was its original purpose. But for
Saint Gaudens's purposes, it was perfect. Huge and rambling, the substan-
tial Federal-style brick structure sat in the midst of a largely unlandscaped
meadow. To Saint Gaudens, the place he would later call Aspet was like an
unsculpted piece of granite.
Augustus Saint Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1848. His
father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, was a French shoemaker from
the little town of Saint-Gaudens in the foothills of
village of Aspet, near the
the Pyrenees. He had traveled from his native France during the 1830s and
1840s to England and Ireland, and in Dublin he met and married Mary
McGuiness of County Longford. When Augustus was six months old,
Bernard gathered up his children and wife and headed for the United States.
They settled in New York City, where Augustus grew up. Augustus always
thought of himself as neither French nor Irish, but American. His name, he
insisted, should always be spelled out, not abbreviated, and it should be
pronounced [SAYNT GAWDuns], with no French pretense. He also omit-
ted the hyphen.
Aspet
51
The front of Aspet. the home of sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens. The Little Studio is on the left.
(Courtesy of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, N H )
At the age of 13, Augustus was apprenticed to a cameo cutter from

whom he learned to cut designs in reUef on stones, and he labored at this
craft throughout his teens. In the evenings, he practiced drawing, with his
father's encouragement, and he began attending the new art school just
opened at Cooper Union. Later he attended the National Academy of

Design.
After completing his apprenticeship at 19, his father sent him to Paris to
see the Exposition of 1867. There, he managed to stretch the $100 that he
had in his pocket, first by staying with relatives, and then by working in an
Italian cutter's studio while he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He left
Paris for Rome in 1870, staying there another five years. There he met
Augusta F. Homer of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later became his wife.

52
After soaking up everything Europe had to offer artistically, Saint
Gaudens returned The 27-year-old craftsman found
to the United States.
his first work painting murals, but when he received a commission to do a
statue in 1876, his life changed dramatically. Called Farragut, this statue
was to be a major public memorial to Civil War Admiral David Glasgow

Farragut. It was a heady project for such a young sculptor, and it began his
long career as a creator of public monuments. Buoyed by the improvement
in his financial prospects, he asked Augusta to marry him.
Augusta and Augustus married 1877 and soon afterward sailed for
in
Paris, where, surrounded by a favorable ambiance. Saint Gaudens worked
on the Farragut statue. He also began the first in a long series of bas-relief
portraits (sculptures that are carved in a flat surface in such a way that they
emerge only slightly from the surface). In this work began to emerge his
unusual skill with delicate lines and masterful modeling.
Ravine Studio ^
Temple
Gallery
. Farragut
V Monument
Saint-Gaudens
National Historic Site
Map of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site
ASPET
53
The Farragut commission was both a great opportunity and a daunt-
ing task. At one point while working on Farragut, Saint Gaudens
summed up what he called "the toughness that pervades a sculptor's
life":"For we constantly deal with molders, contractors, derricks,
. . .
stone-men, ropes, builders, scaffolding, marble-assistants, bronze-men,

trucks, rubbish men, plasterers and what-not else, all the while trying to
soar into the blue."
But when the Farragut was finally unveiled in New York's Madison
Square Garden on Memorial Day 1881, the effect proved worthy of the tri-
als suffered by the young sculptor. The bronze image depicted the staunch
naval officer standing square and firm, his feet planted steadily on the quar-
ter deck, the wind whipping his uniform, binoculars in his right hand, his
left relaxed and confident at his side. The bold, rugged face with penetrat-
ing eyes spoke of heroism, while the huge blue stone block on which he
stood was also carved with subtle bas-relief carvings of two crouching
female figures, one representing courage, the other loyalty. A spray of sea
and graceful dolphins on each side created arms for a bench at the foot of
the base. Art critic Kenyon Cox wrote approvingly, "There is no cold con-
ventionalism . . . but a penetrating imagination which has got at the heart
of the man and given him to us 'in his habit as he lived,' cool, ready, deter-
mined and a hero."
... a sailor, a gentleman
Commissions began flowing in. When he first came to look at
Huggins' Folly in Cornish, he was thinking over concepts for what
would become known as The Standing Lincoln, which he completed in
1887. Other commissions followed, including Amor Caritas, later pur-
chased by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum in Paris;
a portrait of the Scots writer Robert Louis Stevenson, which Saint
Gaudens later modified as the memorial to the author in St. Giles
Cathedral in Edinburgh; and a bust of General William T. Sherman,
which ultimately evolved into the striking statue now standing near
Central Park in New York.
The months he spent at Cornish became more and more important. He
lavished attention on the grounds and transformed an old barn into the
structure he called the Little Studio. Nearby, he built a shop for the plaster-
molder and a studio for his assistants, which, unfortunately, burned in 1904.
The flames consumed all of the sculptor's correspondence, sketchbooks,

54
records of commissions, and several
works in progress, but Saint Gaudens
rebuilt it the following year, dubbing
it the "Studio of the Caryatids."
Gaudens left for Paris again in
Saint
1897, giving up both his New York
residence and studio. But he kept
Huggins' Folly in New Hampshire,
where he returned to settle perma-
nently in 1900.
Naming his new home "Aspet,"
after his father's hometown in
France, he took great joy in planning
new gardens, and transforming the
stark brick house into a fine country
home. To the stark Federal style of
the original structure, he added a

Augustus Saint Gaudens in 1880, at the
colonnaded porch, dormer windows,
age of 32 (Courtesy of the Saint-Gaudens
shuttersand numerous architectural
National Historic Site, Cornish, N.H.)
details, finishing the whole effect
with a glistening coat of white paint. The result was a handsome house. The
Little Studio sported an arcade and trellis graced with vines, with a fountain
in its courtyard decorated with a statue of Pan. On the north side of Aspet,
Saint Gaudens planted hedges and designed winding garden paths through
myriad blooming flowers. Terraces tumbled onto terraces, and broad
expanses of grass were bordered by trees, hedges and flower beds. A stand
of birches called Birch Allee lined a path leading from the house, and in the
distance. Mount Ascutney could be viewed from the Little Studio or from
the piazza of the Main House. At every turn. Saint Gaudens created or cap-
tured a view to delight the eye, and he reveled in changing and improving it
constantly.
Inside, the house is surprisingly stark and Spartan, dimly lit and fur-
nished with uncomfortable wooden furniture. But in the parlor, the walls
are hung with tapestry, and a sumptuous rug covers the floor.
The real treat at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, though, is the
sculpture, which is everywhere, very much as it was when Saint Gaudens
ASPET
55
Aspet and the Little Studio [left] from the side (© 1983 Jeffrey Nintzel, Courtesy, Saint-Gaudens
National Historic Site, Cornish, NH)
lived and worked there —outside

nooks and crannies, inside the studios
in
—
and galleries both copies and originals, clay models and full-size monu-
ments. Nothing is unadorned. An outdoor bench provides an excuse for a
relief of Pan playing his flute, and fountainheads take the form of fishes. A
plaster cast of Seated Lincoln rests near a hedge.

Visitors can see many of Saint Gaudens's most famous works on the
grounds or Gaudens Memorial, including a cast
in the studios of the Saint
of the Adams Memorial, the Admiral Farragut Monument, and a cast of the
—
Shaw Memorial on which Saint Gaudens labored 14 years. The Shaw
Memorial commemorates the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, the first
African-American regiment formed in the Northeast during the Civil War.
Saint Gaudens died of cancer in his home at Aspet in 1907. During his 59
years, he produced a large body of impressive work and threw himself into
the joys of artistic creation in everything he did. His home is a fitting memo-
rial to the spirit he exemplified.

56
A CLOSE-UP THE ADAMS MEMORIAL
In 1886, historian Henry Adams came to Augustus Saint

Gaudens with a poignant request. His wife, Marian, nick-
named Clover, had committed suicide the previous year.
Adams wanted Saint Gaudens to collaborate with architect
John La Farge to find a theme for a memorial to honor her.
Saint Gaudens worked on this project from 1888 until 1891,
at the same time he was working on his famous Diana for the Madison
Square Garden tower in New York City. The two themes, though both
female, were vastly different: Diana, bold and active, the Adams Memorial
quietly pensive and contemplative.
The Adams Memorial resulted in a

figure of a woman seated —although
some say it is neither woman nor
man — slightly larger than life. Her
cloak falls forward, sheltering her
face,provoking an air of mystery.
Her right hand is raised, as if ques-
tioning, but she is completely still.
When Mark Twain saw the figure,

he remarked, "All human grief is
shown in this sad figure." Saint
Gaudens didn't like to talk about it.
He would only say that the phrase
"The peace that passeth understand-
ing" came close to his intentions.
Completed 1890-91, the Adams
Memorial was placed in Washington,
The Adams Memorial (Courtesy of the Saint- D.C.'s Rock Creek Cemetery, where
Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, NH) it provided solace for many visitors
ASPET
57
over the years. Eleanor Roosevelt used to go there to think and gain repose
during her years in the White House (1933-45). She said that to her the
statue represented someone "who had transcended pain and hurt to achieve
serenity," and she believed she saw^ there a woman who had gained "com-
plete self-mastery."
In 1968, a cast of the Adams Memorial was installed at the Saint
Gaudens Memorial.
Â^v?w^vySvÂAySwSvÂAA/SÂ>^

-^
By the time Saint

Gaudens died in 1907,
Aspet and its grounds
had come a very long
way from the inn in the
center of an unadorned
meadow that it had
once been. His wife,
Augusta, saw immedi-
ately that special efforts
should be made to pre-
serve the monument to
art and nature that her
husband had built over
the 22 years that they
The Shaw Memorial is a bas-relief monument commemorat-
had lived there, and she
ing the bravery of the 54th Regiment of the Union army in the
maintained the grounds
Civil War, an all- African- American infantry unit recruited in
until her death in 1926.
the Boston area and led by white commander Robert Gould
In 1919, she established
Shaw. The official memorial stands at the intersection of Bea-
a private corporation
con and Park Streets in Boston, but visitors can view another
original version at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site for its preservation, and
in New Hampshire. (Courtesy of the Saint-Gaudens Na- the grounds were open
tional Historic Site, Cornish, N.H.) to the public during

58
much of her lifetime after Saint Gaudens's death. In 1925, the Saint
Gaudens Memorial, an association formed toward the end of Augusta's life,
took ownership, which it retained for nearly 40 years.
From 1965 to the present, the National Park Service has held ownership
of the memorial, during which time many cultural and educational pro-
grams have been introduced that open the arts up to the public. Among
these is the sculptor-in-residence program, that enables visitors to observe
an work. Courses are also available, and the Park Service has
artist at
opened up an outdoor sculpture museum.
Books about Saint Gaudens
Dryfhout, John. The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Hanover, NH:

University Press of New England, 1982.
Greenthal, Kathryn. Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor. New York:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985.
Wilkinson, Burke. Uncommon Clay: The Life and Work of Augustus Saint-
Gaudens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1985.
Related Site
Shaw Memorial
Boston Commons
Boston, MA
Saint Gaudens designed memorial to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment
this
and its commander Robert Gould Shaw to stand on the Boston Commons,
where it was unveiled in 1897. Visitors to Boston continue to enjoy this
commemoration of black soldiers who fought in the Civil War.
ASPET
59
Charles M. Russell Memorial
HOME AND STUDIO OF ARTIST CHARLES RUSSELL
Great Falls, Montana
AT A GLANCE
Built: House, 1900; Log cabin studio, 1903
Home and studio of Artist Charles Russell from 1900 to 1926
A compact two-story white wood-frame structure, with front and side

gables and a partial wraparound porch. Next door, a log cabin that
served as Russell's studio.
Address:
Charles Russell Memorial

1219 4th Avenue, Great Falls, MT 59405-4355
1
Mailing Address:
c/o C. M. Russell Museum

400 13th Street North
Great Falls, MT 5940 1
- 1 426 (406) 727-8787
60
There are two American Old W^sts the W^st of hard reality and the W^st of
romantic mythology. Cowboy artist Charles M. Russell lived and painted both.
To have talent no credit to its owner; any man that can make
is
a living doing what he likes is lucky, and I'm that. Any time I
cash in now, I win.
— Charles M. Russell
Charles M. Russell —cowboy, pioneer and

—spent most of artist his
62 years living the life he loved best.childhood From his earliest
Charlie, as friends called him, had two goals — to become a cow-
his
boy and to become an —and he succeeded both. In doing he
artist in so,
became the greatest painter of the frontier West that America ever pro-
duced.
Charlie Russell (1864-1926) became the highest-paid living artist of his
time, commanding as much as $20,000 for a painting —what he liked to call
"dead man's prices," with a twinkle in his eye. He completed more than
4,500 works and exhibited his paintings in New York, Chicago, Florida,
California and London.
He also symbolizes the American western experience youthful rebel- —
lion, humor and a philosophic outlook on life coupled with a great nat-—
ural artistic talent (he spent only three days in art school) and unusual
sensitivity. Russell could spin a yarn with the best of them, sometimes
working on a miniature wax sculpture to illustrate his tales. He was shy,
unassuming and charming. And he was able to capture on canvas and in
wax and clay the spirit and the essence of a glorious way of life just as it —
began to vanish for all but the privileged few cowboy stewards of the west-
ern outback who still exist today.
Visitors to Charlie Russell's house and log cabin studio in Great Falls,
Montana, find plenty of evidence both of the Old West lifestyle that he lived
and the art that he produced, as well as the hell-bent way he worked on it.

61
The Charles M. Russell home, Great Falls, Montana, with Russell's trademark steer skull
sculpted in the retaining wall (Ray Ozmon. C. M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, Mont.)
The white, wood-frame home and adjacent log cabin studio stand today
just as they did during the 26 years, from 1900 to 1926, when Charles and
his wife Nancy lived there. Visitors approaching the house recognize his
trademark, a buffalo skull, in sculpture form, installed in the stone retain-
ing wall along the front edge of the yard, where Charlie Russell placed it in
1917.
Born in Oak Hill, Missouri, on March 19, 1864, Charles Marion
Russell was the second of six children. His mother, Elizabeth Mead
Russell, came from a prominent Missouri family, and his father, Charles
Silas, graduated from Yale University before taking over the management
of the Russell family's mining business. As a child, though, Charlie showed

little interest in either society or business. He had, even as a boy, only two

62
great loves —
drawing and the Wild West. He had decided that he wanted
to be a cowboy, and since, as far as he knew, cowboys had little use for
schooling, Charlie didn't have much interest in that, either. He used to cut
school to go down to the wharf to talk to trappers and traders returning
from far up the Missouri River. Even art school held no interest for him,
although he did give it By the time he was sixteen, his par-
a three-day try.
ents began to think that a taste of the real West might tame him down a
bit, and they sent him off to spend some time on a sheep ranch owned by
a family friend in Montana.

Montana was still very wild and unsettled, even in the 1880s. The United
States originally gained possession of the region through the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803, and its first non-native residents were trappers, the so-
called mountain men who were rugged loners and hearty individualists,
ready for the challenges of isolation in the wilderness, far from civilized city
life. But by the 1840s, much of the fur supply had played out, and the height
of the trapper era came to an end. The discovery of gold in Virginia City in
1862, however, brought prospectors to Montana by the thousands, fol-
lowed by the first ranchers, also in the 1860s.
For Native American tribes, who had occupied the area for centuries, the
unprecedented influx of new population represented a real threat to their
way of life. A 400-mile road called the Bozeman Trail established a trade
route from the Oregon Trail in Wyoming to Virginia Cit\% cutting straight
across precious hunting grounds of the Lakota, Cherokee and other tribes.
Meanwhile, the railroad disrupted their lives in Wyoming with its puffing,
shrieking locomotives and its endless ribbons of steel rails. (By 1883, the
Northern would steam across Montana, as well.) Severe
Pacific Railroad
hostilities —
soon broke out the most famous being the Battle of the Little
Big Horn in 1876, in which Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors led by
Chief Sitting Bull, Chief Crazy Horse and Chief Gall completely wiped out
an attacking column of U.S. Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel George
Armstrong Custer. Eventually, the overwhelming power of the federal gov-
—
ernment combined with disease and the mass slaughter of their main
—
source of food, the bison herds overcame the Native American tribes, but
peace did not end the suffering and troubles of the displaced peoples. Nor
had real peace arrived for Montana's new inhabitants. "Wars" between
Montana cattlemen and the sheepmen were still common in the late 1800s.

63
—
Discovery of copper in the 1880s brought hostihties among the competing

mining companies that often broke into guerrilla warfare. And troubles
often involving gunplay —abounded between ranchers, who wanted free
access to land for their cattle to graze, and settlers and homesteaders, who
wanted the ranges fenced for the protection of their crops.
Charlie loved it all immediately —despite the rough-and-tumble exis-
maybe because
tence, or of it. For Charlie, Montana was everything the
Wild West should be. He much, but he had been right in
didn't like sheep
his geographical instincts: the West was his real home. Before long Kid
Russell, as his new western buddies called him, moved on to explore more
—
of Montana first living in the wild as a trapper for a few years, learning
the ropes of hunting and trapping from a mountain man named Jake
Hoover. Later, after a short visit back in St. Louis with his family, he
hooked up with various large and small cattle outfits. He often hired on as
a "night rider," the cowboy whose job it was to watch the cattle during the
dark, nighttime hours to keep them from straying, stampeding or being
stolen by cattle rustlers. It was the perfect job for Russell he could ride by —
—
night and paint and sketch by day and he night wrangled for 1 1 years.
No one, his buddies agreed, could draw a cowboy, a cow or a horse as
well as Russell. And Russell had discovered that, as much as he loved the
cowboy life, it wasn't the best-paying job in the world. So it wasn't long
before he began to pick up extra money
and paintings
selling his sketches
outside the saloons and wherever the cowboys hung around in town.
Sometimes, he even managed to sell his work to wealthy ranch owners, who
could afford his larger and more ambitious paintings of cattle drives, dusty
trails and the hardworking cowboy life. Soon his paintings hung over large
fireplaces in the big ranch houses they built as their cattle businesses pros-
pered and grew.
Like most cowboys in those days, Russell was a drifter who never liked
to spend too much time in one place. There were always new trails to ride,
other places to see and more adventures to be had. In 1888, after spending
a summer working in Canada, Russell met Chief Black Eagle of the Blood
tribe of Native Americans, part of the Blackfoot people. The two men
became friends, and Russell spent the next sixmonths of a long, snowy win-
ter living with the Bloods, learning their customs and painting their lives
with respect and realism.

64
By the 1890s, Russell's painting had begun to attract attention, not just
in the West, among westerners, but also in the East, where his vivid por-
trayals of western life started to gain a following of enthusiastic buyers.
While Russell's work was realistic and usually depicted the day-by-day
activities of working cowboys, it also managed to capture the romantic fla-
vor of the West. This West of popular imagination and legend had filtered
back to the East through the novels of author Ned Buntline and others
who wrote colorful and often highly exaggerated tales of the daring
exploits of such Wild West figures as Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and
Billy the Kid.
Charlie began towind down his days as a roving cowboy in 1896 when
he married Nancy Cooper. He was 31, she was 17, and they were perfectly
suited to each other. Nancy's enthusiasm and level-headedness were just
what Charlie needed. She believed in his talent and had a good head for
business, never one of Charlie's strong points. With her help managing his
career, his paintings started to bring in more money. The financial future
looked strong and, although he had always declined financial help from his
family before, he decided to accept their offer to help him build a house
where he could settle with Nancy and seriously pursue painting as his full-
time work. By the time Charlie and Nancy settled into their new home in
Great Falls, Montana, in 1900, he was 36 and at the peak of his abilities as
an artist.
Being the more organized of the two, and because she wanted to leave
Charlie time to keep on with his painting,Nancy took over supervision of
the new house's design and construction. Around back, the yard was
fenced, with a few trees. There stood Charlie's barn and corrals, where he
kept his saddle horses, the mainstay of the western life he loved.
In the first three years, Russell painted in the living room. But otherwise,
the housewas Nancy's domain and reflected her tastes more than his. It was
a 10-room bungalow, modest but neat, located in the most fashionable area
of Great Falls, a town of 4,000 people in 1890 —
a fair-sized town by
Montana standards in those days. The Russells' two-story wooden house
was compactly arranged, with gables both at the front and sides and a porch
wrapped around one side and part of the front. Inside, the downstairs areas
consisted of a foyer, large living room, formal dining room with a built-in
hutch, a bathroom and kitchen. Another small room was used both as a

65
pantry and maid's room. Unfortunately, none of furnishings used by the
Russells remain —
with the exception of a sewing machine that belonged to
Nancy. But care was taken during reconstruction to restore the house as
much as possible to the way it looked when they lived there. The dark wood
of exposed ceiling beams contrasts handsomely with a diamond-patterned
wallpaper of the period. Visitors are welcomed by a homey living room fire-
place, patterned rugs on hardwood floors, a piano and wooden rocking
chairs. It's easy to imagine the Russells on more formal occasions seated with
guests around the dining room's round table with its lacy covering, the room
lit by a plain chandelier hung from the ceiling by thick chains. This room,
too, reflects Nancy's style, with sheer curtains on the windows and flowery
paper on the walls, but a no-nonsense western flavor still comes through. For
everyday meals, though, Charlie and Nancy probably used the kitchen table.
Charles M. Russell in his studio, prior to 191 1 (C. M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, Mont^

66
placed conveniently near the warmth of the wood-burning kitchen stove
that is, when Charlie wasn't cooking up a pot of grub over his fire in the stu-
dio, which he often did. A portrait of Russell hangs as it well may have in —
his time —
on the stairway landing leading to the second floor. Upstairs were
a tiny bathroom (really just a closet containing a toilet), two large bedrooms
and bedroom used by Jack, the Russells' adopted son. A fourth
a smaller
small bedroom served as a guest room for their frequent company.
But Nancy saw immediately that Charlie needed more space and a different
atmosphere for his work. In 1903, building began on a log cabin next door to
the house — built to resemble Jake Hoover's cabin in the Little Belt Mountains,
where Russell spent his first years in Montana. This became Charlie's private
sanctuary and work area. He filled the cabin with Indian artifacts to ensure the
accuracy of his paintings, and here he worked on or completed all his major
works of art. Here, too, he entertained friends, children and drop in visitors as
he told tall tales and cooked cowboy grub in the open fireplace.
Charlie Russell died October 24, 1926 in an upstairs bedroom in his
Great Falls home. Although he had traveled far and wide during his 26-year
stay in this house —
from New York to California and had often spent his—
winters elsewhere, this had always been his real home.
/Sv/Sv/8v/Sv/8v.
A CLOSE-UP RUSSELL'S STUDIO FIREPLACE
Charlie Russell's studio gave him privacy and space to work,

but it was also a place where he could re-create some of the
flavor of his wrangler days. Sturdily built of telephone poles,
the cabin was constructed to withstand the long Montana
winters. The structure still stands at it did when he painted
there, strewn with the cowboy gear and Native American
artifacts that Russell always kept there. Visitors might find a travois —used
by nomadic Plains tribes for transporting goods — or a saddle, or a buffalo

67
hide or bear skin. He made models of tepees and stagecoaches. He needed
these things for reference as he painted the story of a vanishing way of hfe.
But he also loved them.
The an important part of the atmosphere, too. Russell
fireplace uâs
often enjoyed the companionship of friends in his cabin while he was paint-
ing. Kids from the neighborhood were also always welcome to stop by to
watch him paint, and Russell often spent hours painting and sketching with
young artists. Afterward, he would cook a traditional cowboy meal over
the fire —
simple fare of beans, bacon, and "real. Honest to God, cowboy
biscuits." Visitors who asked for seconds were friends for life.
It's no great stretch of the imagination to visualize Russell working at his
easel, the sound of beans bubbling over the crackling fire, and the sharp
smell of turpentine and oil paint in the air.
Â/Â/SÂAAAAAAAAAAAA/^
After Charlie Russell died in 1926, Nancy and Jack left the harsh winters
of Montana behind and moved to Pasadena, California. They took with
them everything in the old house, except what they gave away leaving —
the place empty. In 1929, Nancy Russell sold the house, studio and land
to the city of Great Falls to be used as a memorial to Charles Russell, and
the studio was opened to the public in 1930.
Later, however, upkeep of the house and grounds became a burden. The
house stood empty and neglected, and by 1965 the city authorities became
concerned about fire hazard. In December of that year, however, the house
was named a National Historic Landmark, along with the log cabin studio,
and luckily, by 1971, the Montana Federation of Garden Clubs of Great
Falls came to the rescue, having found the resources to take over restoration
and care of the property. In 1974, the house was ready to open to the pub-
lic. Garden club volunteers managed it through 1989, when the C. M.
Russell Museum took over. The house, studio and grounds now form
part of the C. M. Russell Museum Complex. The National Historic Site

68
Russell often cooked for his hungry companions over the open hearth in his studio. (C. M.
Russell Museum, Great Falls. Mont.)
also houses a museum building with galleries containing the work of

Charlie Russell and other cowboy artists.Today, a large bronze statue of
Russell dressed in simple cowboy clothes and holding his painter's easel
greets visitors to the complex.
EXPLORING FURTHER
Books about Charles M. Russell
Russell, Austin. C.M.R., Charles M. Russell, Cowboy Artist. New York:

Twayne Publishers, 1957.

69
Taliaferro, John. Charles M. The Life and Legend of America's
Russell:
Cowboy Artist. Boston: Little Brown, 1996.
Winter, Jeanette. Cowboy Charlie: The Story of Charles M. Russell. New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
Related Site
Buffalo Bill Historical Center

720 Sheridan Avenue, P.O. Box 1000
Cody, WY82414
(307)587-4771
An museum
hour's drive from Yellowstone National Park's East Gate, this
is museums in one: The Buffalo Bill Museum, the Plains Indians
four
Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, and the Whitney Gallery of Western
Art, which contains works by Charles M. Russell, Frederic Remington and
many other interpreters of the American West.

70
Taliesin West
HOME AND STUDIO OF ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Scottsdale, Arizona
AT A GLANCE
Built: Begun in 1937; originally completed in 1940
Winter home, studio and architectural laboratory of architect

Frank Lloyd Wright from 1937 to 1959
Address:
Taliesin West
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
12621 Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard
Scottsdale, Arizona 85261-4430
(602)860-2700
71
A flamboyant architect with the mind, heart and spirit of an artist. Frank Lloyd
bright believed that a building should reflect its natural surroundings. The
structure of his own home and studio known as Taliesin W^st reflects, not only its
natural surroundings, but also the nature of the man himself.
Know why a house is good, know that the proportions belong,

know that the building looks as though it belonged there where
and couldn't be seen am^where else and shouldn't be.
it is
—
Know a building's charm the kind of appeal that good
comfortable clothes have, the way good shoes fit you. That's
the good house. That is the quality house.
—Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958, in Truth Against the World
Taliesin (pronounced tally-ESS-in) was named by Frank Lloyd Wright

after an ancient Welsh bard who sang about the glories of fine art.
The name can be roughly translated into "Radiant Brow." For
Wright, the name was a symbol and an attitude a home and studio, as —
well as a state of mind. In his lifetime he built two Taliesins the first in his —
native Wisconsin; the second, Taliesin West, in Arizona.
For many, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was America's greatest archi-
tect, and perhaps, as architectural critic Robert Campbell once asserted, "The
greatest artist this country has ever produced . . . America's other great
artists —our painters, sculptors, composers, don't really rank with the tops of
all time. They're not Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Beethoven. Wright alone
has that standing."
It was an evaluation that Wright, not given to false modesty, shared. He
once testified in a court of law that he was the greatest architect in America.
Queried about the testimony afterward, he replied, with absolute serious-
ness, "I was under oath."
Not everyone agreed though, and in the early days of his career, Wright's
ideas and style met heavy resistance and his struggle to get commissions for

72
VJrights Taliesin VJest illustrates the architect's concept of "organic architecture" that blends with
the surrounding landscape. (Copyright © Pedro E. Guerrero)
his work verged on the heroic. The heroic, though, was a stance that Wright
feh a kinship for. Possessing a strong dramatic sense (he was fond of wear-
ing dark flowing capes even in his youth), he saw himself as a "radiant
brow," and his ideas, because they were his ideas, as unassailable. It was a
stance that many, even among his supporters, saw as sheer unbending ego-
tism. For Wright it was, like his flowing cloak, a flamboyant shelter, fend-
ing off the rains of criticism with dramatic flair, permitting him to pursue
his work, his ideas, his visions, without wasting his energy on self-defense,
or allowing himself to become paralyzed by self-doubt.
Wright attempted to create architecture that reflected and adapted to the
diverse and widely divergent landscapes of an entire continent. Never con-
tent to focus on one narrow aspect of structures, he successfully developed
an architecture that both evolved out of human needs and reflected its nat-
ural surroundings. No aspect escaped his attention —
from orchestrating the
approach to a building to choosing the perfect site and the position of the
Taliesin West
73
building on the site. He modulated contrast and repetition, using progres-
sive changes of ceiling heights, alternating and dark, constriction and
light
openness, opaque and transparent materials, turns and straight lines. His
materials seem to sing as they do for no one else, their essence brought out
by the way in which they are used.
And above all, change seems constantly at the heart of Wright's creation.
As Campbell remarked, "Wright's best work always seems to be in process,
as alive as a forest, open to change and growth." Wright constantly built,
rebuilt, changed and added to everything he designed. (He would even return
to a house he had designed months, even years later, and begin rearranging
the furniture, to the consternation of the people who lived there.) This was
especially true of his own homes, and TaHesin West was no exception.
Born on June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd
—
Wright always felt a kinship for the rolling hills of his native state which
were also reminiscent of the terrain in Wales from which his mother's fam-
ily had come 23 years earlier. As a young student, he spent about one year,
beginning in 1886, studying geometry and drawing at the University of

Wisconsin and then left school to begin his career.
He started out as a draftsman for a series of architects in Chicago, where
he learned the basics. In 1889, Wright married Catherine Tobin and built
—
her a home in Oak Park, Illinois only the second structure he had ever
designed. He was 22. Over the coming 13 years, Frank Lloyd and Catherine
would have six children, and they added on to the house as the family grew.
Originally, Wright designed the Oak Park house in the shingle style made
popular by the Chicago firm of Adler and Sullivan, Wright's first employer.
(In fact, he borrowed $5,000 from Louis Sullivan to buy the lot and pay the
builders.) But the design already had many innovations, including a tree
growing up through the roof. As he would for future homes, Wright
designed every piece of furniture as well as the architecture surrounding the
new living space. The basic plan was a simple gabled cottage clothed in
brown shingles. But the geometry and flow of the rooms was unusual, and
here he tried out early experiments with indirect lighting, built-in seating
and special heating elements. Feeling ready to branch out on his own, by
1893 he started a practice in Oak Park, and by 1898 he had added a pro-
fessional work space to his house. He added entrance arcades that had the
look of sculpture, an octagonal library and a two-story drafting room that

74
had the shape of a polygon. All of these features became landmarks of
Wright's style.
From the beginning, Wright had evolved an architecture based on the

premise that structures should be human in scale and should exemplify
w^hat he called "organic architecture," in tune both with their surroundings
and their purpose, and functioning as an integrated whole. During these
early years of his practice, he introduced a design for private residences that
he called "prairie houses," built to harmonize with the midwestern prairies
that he knew and loved. These houses featured horizontal lines, like the
prairie, and open floor plans, with rooms flowing freely into each other.
Wide windows and open terraces let the outdoors come inside in a way no
one had ever done before. This concept won him international acclaim and
by the end of the century was reflected throughout the continent in what are
known as ranch-style houses.
In 1909, Wright went to Europe, where he toured for two years, observ-
ing the design of structures and absorbing ideas. He never went back to
Oak Park. Instead, after his return, in 1911, he began work on a new pro-
ject, one that would provide a solace, a centering point for himself. It would
be both his home and his studio, a repository of everything that he had con-
ceived of so far architecturally and would grow as he grew. Here, Wright
built a school for architects and for the first time began to gather students
around him. From that time on, he combined his practice with teaching,
which he loved nearly as much as design work. This was the first Taliesin,
built in the rolling hills of Wisconsin. His materials were simple and basic:
plain wood, plaster and fieldstone quarried on the site. There was little of
the elaborate material, stained glass, metal or fancy sculpture that he usu-
ally employed in the houses of his clients; he couldn't afford them for him-
self. What he could afford was to express himself more directly in his work
than he had ever done before. Taliesin was his. It expressed not only his
ideas, but his personality and lifestyle.
Wright's private life was tumultuous, haunted by disaster and tragedy,
facing constant financial straits, even bankruptcy. In 1908, having built a
growing practice and establishing a reputation, he had walked away from
his practice as well as his wife and six children, never looking back. He had
fallen in love with a woman named Mamah Borthwick, and, although they
never married, she became an important part of his life at Taliesin. Then in
Taliesin West
75
1914, when Wright was away, employee walked into the house
a disgruntled
with an ax and attacked the group gathered there, killing Mamah
—
Borthwick, her son John and daughter Martha murdering seven people in
all and wounding others. In a final venomous act, the intruder burned down
the house. He ran away and hid in the basement of a nearby house but was
found. The sheriff and his men saved him from being lynched, but he died in
jail two months later — apparently
from starving himself. At Mamah's
funeral Wright, grief-stricken, asked everyone to leave and stood at
Mamah's grave alone. "All I had left to show for the struggle for freedom of
the five years past," Wright later remarked, "had now been swept away."
The Taliesin studio, however, did remain, with a small bedroom behind
it, which Wright took as a sort of omen. Within months, reconstruction had
begun and the phoenix began rising from the ashes. Wright directed that
shards from the remains be imbedded in the cement pillars of the rebuilt
Taliesin later known as Taliesin East. In 1914, Wright met another woman
who stole his heart, Miriam Noel. With Wright in the throes of a drawn-out
divorce from Catherine, however, they didn't marry until 1923, in a secret
ceremony on a Wisconsin bridge. It didn't last long, though. Five years
later, Wright divorced Miriam and married the mother of his seventh child,
lovanna, who was born in 1925. His third wife, Olgivanna Ivanovna
Lazovich, would play a central role in his life until his death.
—
During these years, Wright's vision continued to develop and contin-
ued to run counter to prevailing trends. After World War I, when his col-
leagues were designing modernist, machine-age looks, Wright maintained
his preference for flat roofs (which, admittedly, sometimes leaked) and con-
crete block material. Neither grounded in 19th-century neoclassical and
neo-Gothic styles nor enamored of the high-rise steel and glass of the 20th
century, Wright stood alone. His clean, supple lines were thoroughly mod-
ern, but his love of warm, earthy tones and use of decoration placed him
out of step with trends in international design.
His engineering, however, was formidable. Commissioned to design the

Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was completed in 1922, he came into
severe criticism for his approach. But the hotel was the only major building
in Tokyo to survive the disastrous earthquake of 1923.
The most famous of his houses was Falling Water at Bear Run,
Pennsylvania, a private residence built in 1936, of which the most striking

76
feature was that, designed around a running stream, portions of the house
were cantilevered out over the falls. His first big commission came when the
Johnson Wax Company asked him to design their corporate headquarters
in Racine, Wisconsin.
Wright loved to be the center of attention, to the point of narcissism. But
he was complex. Jeanne T. Bletzer, his daughter Catherine Wright's niece,
"Of course he was vain. He would be talking to me and if there
later recalled,
was a mirror in the room he'd be looking into that the whole time and not at
me." But to those close to him, this self-absorption was understandable. "He
had to believe in himself," she added. "Nobody else did for a long time."
Innovative engineer Buckminster Fuller also remarked, "In public, he
had a histrionic sense. When he got on the stage he really enjoyed tremen-
dously playing a part, and he enjoyed tremendously shocking people. . . .
But when you were alone with Frank Lloyd Wright, in his own chambers,
he became not only modest but really a very humble child." Perhaps genius
requires this childlike quality — both for the openness and creativity it
enables and for the charm it casts on an otherwise hostile world. Architect
Wesley Peters, who became Wright's son-in-law reminisced, "With all his
genius as regards architecture, with all his strong personality, in essence he
was still a boy. Perhaps this was one of the reasons we all loved him."
In 1937, enchanted with Arizona, Wright began work on a new project
that caught his imagination and held it for the rest of his life, a work that
many consider his greatest project, Taliesin West, a new Taliesin in the
Southwest. Like his first Taliesin, Taliesin West would be his combined
home, studio and school, but in an entirely different environment.
As he wrote:
I was struck by the beauty of the desert, by the dry, clear sundrenched
air,by the stark geometry of the mountains, the entire region was an
inspiration in strong contrast to the lush, pastoral landscape of my
native Wisconsin. And out of that experience, a revelation is what I
guess you might call it, came the design for these buildings. The design
sprang out of itself, with no precedent and nothing following it.
He built a cluster of structures, with the help of apprentices and students.

As photographer Pedro Guerrero wrote of the finished Taliesin, "I realized
that it was sculpture ... a sculpture of canvas, redwood and stone rising
Taliesin West
77
Looking out from the Taliesin Vêst entrance, the outside seems to come indoors. (Copyright
© Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation)
out of the desert. Its colors and textures were those of the ground from
which it evolved."
The approach to Taliesin winds gradually into the foothills of the
McDowell Mountains, twisting along a typical desert wash, always respect-
ful of the land it crosses. The buildings of Taliesin West come upon one as
a complete surprise, nestled unobtrusively among the desert hills.

The first building is the office, a structure of sloping stone and concrete
walls. A translucent roof is supported by beams of wood and steel. During
Wright's lifetime, this was his business office, which he also used as a design
studio and reception area. This structure set the theme for the entire com-
plex, with its bold, angular form set against the rocky desert soil. It looks as
though it had always been there and extends into a broad concrete terrace,
rhythmically marked with patterns.
The drafting studio beyond is part of a group of interconnected buildings
that also include the kitchen and dining area. The studio is huge 96 feet by —
78
30 feet —with a fireplace at one end and a concrete vault for drawings at the
other. All these spaces look out on a garden, terrace and pool area that seem
to form a prow of a ship. A walk along the edge leads to the Wright living
quarters.
Wright designed, rebuilt and rearranged the living quarters constantly,
never satisfied and always tinkering. Its main area is a large, well-lit room that
echoes the long, narrow shape of the office and studio. This room, too, opens
onto a garden on one side, while it opens up to the horizon on the other.
Other structures in the complex include a a theater, a music pavilion and
a court where some of the apprentices lived. Others preferred to live in tents
and small structures on the desert.
Taliesin West was an important turning point in Wright's life as an archi-
tect. Both before and after the time it was built, Wright accomplished extra-
ordinary feats, but Taliesin West always stood out as unique.

Wright was still building at the age of 91, having just completed the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, with its controversial
The living area at Taliesin Vêst (Copyright © Pedro E Guerrero)
Taliesin West
79
spiral design, and he was working on a civic center for Marin County,
located north of San Francisco. He never seemed to give a thought to the idea
that his life might end, and so when Wright complained of stomach pains
one April evening at Taliesin West, no one thought much of it. Writing off
the problem as flu, he went to bed early. When the pains persisted, though,
his doctor sent him to a hospital in Phoenix, where tests showed an intesti-
nal obstruction. An operation to resolve the problem seemed successful, and
Wright's third wife, Olgivanna, was resting in a room nearby, when early in
the morning on April 9, 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright "just sighed and died," —
in the words of the nurse who was with him.
A unique genius who lived a stormy and eccentric life, Frank Lloyd
Wright left a stamp upon the architecture of America that is reflected every-
where we look. As his granddaughter, the actress Anne Baxter, wrote after
his death, "Grandfather's roots were so vibrantly American that just speak-
ing about him made you believe all over again in native American space and
beauty and tenacity and daring."
y^/jÂK/JK/^,
A CLOSE-UP APPRENTICESHIP IN THE DESERT
Nearly as much as designing and building, Wright loved to

teach, and by 1911, when he built what is now called
Taliesin East, he had already begun gathering about himself
a group of younger architects and designers. At Taliesin
West, he developed a carefully conceived apprenticeship pro-
gram, designed to allow students to experience and develop a
philosophy of living and building. He sought to teach about life as much as
about design. "He taught me to mistrust facades," his Oscar-winning
granddaughter Anne Baxter once wrote, "and always to observe life
beneath the surfaces; to find excitement in a seed pod or beauty in a car-
penter's hammer." He imparted the same message to his apprentices as

well.

80
Apprentices at Taliesin West lived in the desert in tents or shelters during
the first year of their training. This experience, Wright believed, encouraged
a sense of adventure and experimentation in the presence of nature.
Sleeping at ground level, with nothing but a membrane of cloth between
themselves and its sounds, apprentices would learn to be in tune with the
desert's moods, and they would become aware of the creatures and natural
forces at work. There, too, they would learn the desert's economy of nature
and see its relationship to Wright's precepts of organic architecture in
which each part is an interdependent portion of the whole.
Â/SvA/SvS^/Â/SvÂAAAAAAAyij

Taliesin West is the international headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright
Foundation, established by Wright in 1940, which operates the Frank
The bell tower at Taliesin West (Copyright © Pedro E Guerrero)
Taliesin West
81
Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and the Frank Lloyd Wright
Archives. The foundation owns and operates both East and West
Taliesins, which are National Historic Landmarks —
Taliesin (or Taliesin
East) in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. Both historic sites are
open to the public for educational tours and seminars. The structures of
Taliesin West reflect Wright's work afits finest, which some 100,000 vis-
itors come to see each year. Architectural writer Martin Fuller put it best
when he wrote, "Taliesin is no less than Wright's autobiography in
masonry and wood." And architectural critic Robert Campbell once pro-
claimed, Taliesin is ". . . my candidate for the title of the greatest single
building in America."
Books about Frank Lloyd Wright
McDonough, Yona Zeldis. Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Chelsea

House, 1992.
Meehan, Patrick J., ed. Frank Lloyd Wright Remembered. Washington,
DC: Preservation Press, 1991.
Riley, Terence, ed., with Peter Reed. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect. New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994.
Sanderson, Arlene, ed. Wright Sites: A Guide to Frank Lloyd Wright Public
Places. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995.
Secrest, Meryle. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1992.
Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Horizon Press,
1976.
Multimedia on Frank Lloyd Wright
The Ultimate Frank Lloyd Wright (CD-ROM) Microsoft/Byron Preiss
Multimedia. New York, 1995

82
Related Places
Taliesin East
Highway 23
Spring Green, WI 53588
(608)588-2511
Wright's first Tahesin, built in 1911 in the rolUng Wisconsin countryside
that Wright loved.
Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio

951 Chicago Avenue
Oak 60302
Park, IL
(708) 848-1976
The first residence and workplace Wright designed for himself. Open to the
public. Nearly 30 other Wright sites are also open to the public, including
the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Taliesin West
83
Willa Gather Pioneer Memorial
CHILDHOOD HOME OF NOVELIST WILLA GATHER
Red Cloud, Nebraska
AT A GLANCE
Built: ca. 1879
Childhood home of Willa Gather from 1884 to 1890
Small clapboard house in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a small farming

community of 2,300 people on the Great Plains. Rented by Willa Gather's
father when she was nine years old, this house —
in this community —is
where the writer spent her formative years.
Mailing Address:

326 North Webster Street
Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970
(402) 746-2653
Address:
Third and Cedar Streets

Red Cloud, Nebraska
84
"She is the best that we have," American poet "Wallace Stevens once said ofîlla
Gather. The prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist from Nebraska wrote 12
novels and 58 short stories — many of them imbued with the pioneer spirit of the
town of Red Cloud and the surrounding plains, where she grew up.
It's a queer thing about the flat country — it takes hold of you,
or it leaves you perfectly cold. ... I go everywhere, I admire all
kinds of country. I tried to live in France. But when I strike the

open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe
differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country
like the sea —
it's the grand passion of my life. I tried for years
to get over it. I've stopped trying. It's incurable.
—Willa Gather, in a 1935 interview for Time magazine
The Wi/lfl Cather Memorial Prairie in summertime-. 610 acres south of Red Cloud, owned by the
Nature Conservancy and named in honor of V\f ilia Cather (Michael lean impressions Courtesy
of the Willa Cather Pioneer Mennorial and Educational Foundation)
WiLLA Cather Pioneer Memorial

85
i
A popular and
ur] is
critical success in her lifetime, Willa Gather
acknowledged today as one of the major fiction writers of the
20th century. In her work, she celebrated the spirit and will of the
—
people she grew up with in Nebraska people who had come to this barren
plain from Sweden, Bohemia, Norway and Russia to farm and to find a bet-
[KATH-
ter life. And she drew from her observations of the people and the place
(which she called Hanover, Moonstone, Black Hawk, and several other
names, in her various works) that she had known as a child.
Not a native Nebraskan, Willa Sibert Gather (1873-1946) was born in
Winchester, Virginia. But at the age of nine she moved west with her fam-
ily, and a year later, in 1884, they settled into the little house in the small
town of Red Gloud, surrounded by the barren plains of Nebraska. The dra-
matic contrast between the lush green of humid Virginia's coastal climate
and the dry flatland caught her up and left her breathless. These, she would
later say, were her most formative years. They were the years that gave her
a great well of experience to draw on as a writer.

Red Gloud in those days was a busy center on the Burlington Railroad,
with a population of 1,838 at its peak in 1890, which has dwindled today
to around 1,200. As a child Willa rode around the country on her pony, get-
ting acquainted with her neighbors. "I used to ride home in the most unrea-
sonable state of excitement," she once remarked. "I always felt as if they
—
had told me so much more than they said as if I had actually got inside
another person's skin." She was interested in their customs and their food.
She admired their stamina and will, the way they paid off their mortgages
and worked hard.
Willa also saw the negative aspects of life in Red Gloud. Those who
gained wealth tended to look down on those born in other countries, who
came to the plains with little money. They scoffed at their accents and their
different ways. Gather felt stifled by this atmosphere, even as a young girl,
and knew that one day she would have to find a place where people were
more tolerant and open. The vast openness of the plains did not always
seem to touch the hearts of these people.
For a time, as a young girl. Gather rebelled against the restrictions
imposed on girls. She signed her name William Gather, Jr., and wore her
hair in a manly cut. She scraped together the money to pursue a solid edu-
cation, attending the University of Nebraska at Lincoln for five years, and

86
IniM !
aiiJiiiL'it..
Wil/a Gather's childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska [Pat Phillips. Courtesy of the Willa
Gather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation)
it was there that she began writing. After graduation in June 1895, she
returned briefly to Red Cloud. Her first break came the following spring
when she was offered a job editing a new magazine, Home Monthly, which
was just starting up in Pittsburgh. So in June 1896, she traveled east, where
she discovered that, even as a woman at the turn of the century, she could
make and writing, and she began to build a reputation as a
a living editing
superb stylist and a fine writer. After a brief stint teaching high school com-
position, 1905-06, and by now an extensively published author, she joined
the staff of New York City-based McClure's Magazine, which she edited
until 1910, when she left to devote full time to her own writing.
For the rest of her life, she lived in New York City, returning to Red
Cloud only for visits. Cather's faculty for keen observation during her years
in Red Cloud had paid off for her in her writing. Six of her 12 novels
including One of Ours, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize were set, at —
87
least partially, in her memories of Red Cloud. And in them, she explored
aspects of on the prairie that few others have evoked as powêrfuUy.
life
O Pioneers!, pubUshed in 1913, was Gather's first book to use her home-
land as a setting. It is the story of Swedish immigrants, and its protagonist,
Alexandra Bergson, is a strong-willed, able woman. Gather contrasts her
capable management of her farm with the Bergson family's difficulty at
adjusting to life in America.
Of My Antonia, published in 1918, another Gather book drawn from
Red Gloud, literary critic H. L. Mencken wrote: "No romantic novel ever
written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Anto-
nia.'' Gather herself called it "the best thing I've done."
Visitors to Red Gloud and the Gather home find scenes and on
structures
every hand that recall her fiction, to the point that the place has become
part of America's fictional landscape. Because of a housing shortage, when
the Gathers came town they had to settle for a house that was too small
to
for the family of four children, two parents, one grandmother, a servant girl
and a cousin that moved in. And it later seemed to grow steadily smaller
and more crowded as the Gather family grew larger, with the addition of
three more Gather children, born in Red Gloud. Located on the corner of
Third and Gedar, a block from the business section of town, it's a pleasant
wood-frame structure with a large, shady yard, and a welcoming look. In
The Song of the Lark, Willa Gather wrote, "They turned into another street
and saw before them a lighted window; a low story-and-a-half house, with
a wing built on at the right and a kitchen addition at the back, everything a
little on the slant —
roofs, windows, and doors." The house she described
was her family home in Red Gloud.
Today, the downstairs of the house is still furnished much as it was in
Gather's childhood, with wallpapered walls, patterned rugs and sturdy,
—
comfortable, polished wood furniture. The family Bible where the Gathers
followed the tradition of recording family birth and death dates — sits in a
place of prominence on a marble-topped table in the parlor. In this book, in
a moment of vanity, Willa changed her own
from 1873 to 1876
birth date
and changed her given name, Wilella, to Willa. The potbellied stove where
the children warmed themselves on chilly Nebraska mornings still stands in
the parlor. A few steps away, through the double doors of the parents' bed-
room, a bed for the youngest child still rocks on the braided rug near Gharles

88
and Jennie Gather's big four-poster bed. French doors open from the parlor
into the dining room, where a large, round dining table is set, with a high-
chair nearby, since there were nearly always Httle children underfoot.
The room that served as a bedroom for Grandmother Boak — ^Jennie's
mother, who lived with the Gathers —is really just a passageway (described
in Gather's story, "Old Mrs. Harris") on the way from the dining room to
the kitchen. In the kitchen, visitors can see where bread was baked every
Monday morning, in the prairie tradition of the time, and set out to cool.
Two washbasins on the kitchen table stand ready for after-supper dish
—
washing one for washing, the other for rinsing. Once the chore was done,
the excess water would be tossed out the back door.
A narrow stairway from the kitchen leads to the upstairs an attic, —
really— which is still the large, unfinished space that Gather described in her
fiction. This was the older children's private world, "where," as Gather
described it in her story "The Best Years," "there were no older people pok-
ing about to spoil things." The attic runs the length of the house and has
"No plaster, no beaver board lining; just the roof shingles, supported by
long, unplaned, splintery rafters that sloped from the sharp roofpeak down
to the floor of the attic. Bracing these long roof rafters were cross rafters on
which one could hang things." Through this space pass two brick chimneys,
which Gather described as "going up in neat little stairsteps from the plank
floor to the shingle roof — and out of it to the stars." In winter, tiny flakes
of snow would slip through the cracks in the ceiling, sprinkling the room
with a fine veil of white. At one end of the room, double beds with curved
iron bedsteads are still lined up dormitory-style, their quilts and pillows
smoothed as if waiting for tousled, sleepy heads at the end of a long day
for this is where all the Gather children slept, except Willa. As the oldest,
she had a room of her own at one end of the attic area, an L-shaped wing
partitioned off to create her private place, which she decorated to suit her
own tastes. This room remains exactly as she left it (see "A Glose-Up").
"A house can never be beautiful until it has been lived in for a long
time. ... ," Willa once wrote to a friend who was moving to a new home.
"The beauty lies in the associations that cluster around it, the way in which
the house has fitted itself to the people." The Gather family lived in this house
for20 years, and visitors can readily derive a sense of beauty from their home,
and a vivid picture as well of the childhood that Willa Gather spent here. For

89
The parlor and parents' bedroom on the first floor. The large book on the table is the Bible in which Willa
Gather changed her birth date, and the stove is the one Gather describes in The Song
of the Lark. (Courtesy of the Willa Gather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation)

90
those who have read Gather's novels and stories, her words will resound
wherever they look. Local docents can cite a passage from her work, some-
times several, for nearly every room. And the echoes heard by a talented and
perceptive young woman still reverberate through the little house.
The rest of Red Cloud evokes Gather's stories as much as or even more
than the house does. Visitors can see the Gatholic Ghurch where Willa lis-
tened to the town's best choir, and where the real Antonia of My Antonia,
Annie Sadilek, married Jim Pavelka (Anton Guzak in the book). And
nearby, they can visit the Grace Episcopal Ghurch that Gather belonged
to from 1922 until her death in 1947. Both are restored and are part of
the tour of Gather's Red Gloud. Also, the Burlington Railroad Depot,
restored to its late 1880s appearance, recalls the many departures and
arrivals that take place in Gather's fiction —
and in her real life. This is the
final stop on an interpretive tour that uses Red Gloud sites to describe life
in the 1880s as explored in Gather's fiction. Visitors to this Nebraska
town come away with both a unique understanding of the pioneer spirit
that left its stamp here and an enriched appreciation of the grace and
insight of a major artist's work.
/5v/&v/&v/8^/8v.
A CLOSE-UP GROWING ROOM

British writer Virginia Woolf once wrote that to develop her
creative imagination she thought that a girl needed "a room
own." All the Gather children slept in the attic, but
of her
Willa was lucky. As the oldest she received the privilege of
having a room of her own, one that she had the freedom to
decorate herself. Using money that she earned working in the
local drug store, she bought a floral wallpaper, yellow with tiny brown and
red roses. Gather's room was, and still is, exactly like the one decorated by
Thea, in The Song of the Lark. It was "snugly lined with soft pine. The ceil-
ing was so low that a grown person could reach it with the palm of the

91
hand, and it sloped down on There was only one window, but
either side.
it was one and went to the floor." It had "a brown carpet," "white
a double
cheesecloth curtains hung on tape," "an old walnut dresser with a bro-
. . .
ken mirror," "her own lumpy walnut single bed, and a blue washbowl and
which she had drawn at a church fair lottery," and a bedside table
pitcher
made from a "tall round wooden hat-crate draped with cretonne.". . .

The Gather childhood home has been restored thanks to the efforts of the
Willa Gather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (WGPM), a
private, nonprofit organization founded
1955 to preserve the world that
in
Willa Gather wrote about. Through purchases and gifts, the WGPM has also
acquired and restored other buildings in Red Gloud, including the Gerber
Bank (built in 1889), the Burlington Depot (1897), the St. Juliana Falconieri
Gatholic Ghurch (1883), the Grace Episcopal Ghurch (ca. 1900) and the
Dane Ghurch (1902). All of these buildings figure in some way in Gather's life
and work. Additionally, the group has acquired the Pavelka farmhouse, from
which Gather drew much of the material for My Antonia. There are plans for
restoration of the exterior and the nearby fruit cellar.
The Gather childhood home was designated a National Historic
Landmark in 1971, and in 1978 the Willa Gather Historical Genter was
founded as a branch museum of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
Visitors can participate in daily tours of all the restored properties,
including the Gather childhood home.
Books by Willa Gather
Gather, Willa. Collected Short Fiction. Edited by Virginia Faulkner.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

92
. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Random House, 1990.
. My Antonia. With a foreword by Kathleen Norris. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
O Pioneers] Library of America Edition. New York: Literary
Classics of the United States, 1987.
.The Song of the Lark. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.
Willa Gather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Selected
Letters. Edited by L. Brent Bohlke. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987.
Gather Books on the Internet:
Project Gutenberg provides the full text on-line of the following Gather
works: Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneersl and The Song of the Lark.
Search on: Project Gutenberg.
Books and Articles about Willa Gather
Brown, E. K. Completed by Leon Edel. Willa Gather: A Critical Biography.

Originally published 1953. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987.
Slote, Bernice. Willa Gather: A Pictorial Memoir. With photographs by
Lucia Woods et al. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974.
Stouck, David. Willa Gather's Imagination. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1975.
Woodress, James. Willa Gather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1987.
Related Places
Willa Gather Historical Center

North Webster Street
Red Cloud, NE 68501
(402) 746-2653
The Willa Gather Historical Center is housed in the restored 1889 Farmers'
and Merchants' Bank, which Gather describes in her fiction. It displays
photographs, original manuscripts and other Gather mementos, and here

93
tours begin of the other Cather-related historical town including
sites in —
the Gather childhoodhome, the Burlington Depot, St. Juliana Falconieri
Catholic Church, Grace Episcopal Church and the Pavelka farmstead
(described in My Antonia).
The Willa Gather Memorial Prairie

5.5 miles south of Red Cloud on Highway 281
Red Cloud, Nebraska
Visitors can drive by or stop and gaze across the expanse of this example of
the grassy, treeless plains that Gather first encountered at the age of nine
when her family moved to Nebraska. Part of the National Historic Site, the
land is owned and administered by the Nature Conservancy.

94
i
Beak Street
SPIRITUAL HOME OF W. C. HANDY AND THE BLUES
Memphis, Tennessee
Established: from the 1 800s to the early 1 900s
Home of the blues from the 1 9 Os to the present

1
Memphis, Tennessee's Beale Street, which stretches eastward from the

Mississippi River for 1 5 blocks, was once the home of wealthy cotton
plantation owners before the Civil War. From the 1890s to the 1920s, Beale
Street became the center of the black community in Memphis and a
musical center where America's first original music— —
the blues became
established as a genre. Here black musicians — including W. Handy, C.
"Father of the Blues" — bloomed and flourished.

Address:
Beale Street Historic District

168 Beale Street
Memphis, TN 38103
(901 ) 526-01 10 (Beale Street Management)
95
W. C. Handy, often called the "Father of the Blues," once wrote-. "The seven
wonders of the world 1 have seen, and many are the places I have been. Take my
advice, folks, and see Beale Street first." Today, walking down Beale Street — the
"Home of the Blues"

— in Memphis, Tennessee, you can still feel the excitement
that captivated Handy in the early 1900s. Bustling with music and energy,
Beale Street beats with the heart and soul of American music —
blues, jazz, and rock and roll.
Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.
— ^Jimi Hendrix (1942-70), rock musician
When William
Memphis, Tennessee,
Christopher
in
Handy (1873-1958) moved to
1905, he had been on the road for many
years, traveling, playing musicand leading bands throughout the
United States, Canada and Cuba. His father and grandfather had been min-
isters, and his father had hoped that W. C. wôuld follow in their footsteps.
But Handy had other ideas. Born in Florence, Alabama, Handy loved
music, particularly the music that he had grow^n up with throughout the
—
South the chants of field hands, convicts and laborers, the African-
American spirituals and the rinky-tink sounds of ragtime, one of the earli-
est forms of jazz —
and he wanted to play it. His father staunchly opposed
it, believing that music was the devil's pastime. When young Handy saved
for many months to buy a guitar, his angry father insisted that he exchange
it for a copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Young Handy's love of
music was too strong to be defeated, though, and after purchasing a trum-
pet for one dollar from a visiting circus musician, he began practicing in
secret. When he decided to join up with a local band, the final clash with his
father was inevitable. With neither father nor son willing to budge an inch,
—
the conclusion was also inevitable the younger Handy, trumpet in hand,
joined up with a traveling minstrel show. It was the first of many such
shows and many other jobs playing, and for a brief period even teaching.

96
Musicians play today on Beale Street in much the same way they did in Randy's time.
(Courtesy of the Memphis Visitors and Convention Center)
music over the next few years. From 1903 to 1921, he led his own band. By
the time W. C. Handy arrived in Memphis, everything had begun to come
together for him at last.
"The Saga of Beale Street, as I knew it, goes back to a bright summer
morning in the eighteen-eighties," wrote Handy in his autobiography,
Father of the Blues, in 1941.
A freight train slowed down and came to a stop in North Memphis.

Presently a ragged immigrant boy, a dark-browed Italian youngster called
Pee Wee crept out from under one of the box cars. He had come all the way
from New York on the knew it he was standing over a
rods. . . . Before he
crap game. . . . known a good fellow when it sees
Beale Street had always
one, and Beale Street has always been hospitable and big-hearted. From the
moment he got down and put his money in sight, Pee Wee was in.
Beale Street, with its wide-open, frenetic, anything-goes atmosphere of

saloons, gambling houses and sports parlors, took to Pee Wee, and Pee Wee
Beale Street
97
took to Beale Street. By the time that W. C. Handy arrived in town, Pee Wee
had purchased his own, now legendary, combination saloon and gambling
house.
As Handy described the place, "Just inside Pee Wee's entrance door there
was a cigar stand. A side room was given to billiards and pool, another to
crap games and cards. In a back room there was space where violins, horns
and other musical instruments were checked by free lance musicians. . . .
Sometimes you couldn't step for the bull fiddles. ... It was perfectly natural
that Pee Wee's should become the headquarters for our band. ..."
Although he's often been called the "Father of the Blues," W. C. Handy
didn't invent that particularly American musical form. No one person
"invented" the blues. It was created by a people, African Americans, out of
their experiences. Its roots were work songs, field hollers and the call-and-
response pattern of African music. It grew out of unhappiness and longing,
and its sound was the soulful and wailing weariness of poverty, hard work,
lost love and loneliness.
As an African-American W. C. Handy had been hearing the sounds of
the blues as he traveled throughout the South. He heard them again on
Beale Street, at Pee Wee's and the other saloons, in the streets and on the
levees, among the gamblers and street hustlers, the farmhands in for a night
on the town and the traveling musicians sleeping on the floors of smoky
bars, the scramblers and seekers, the men and women, singing their music
of life, death and survival. What W. C. Handy did was to borrow those
sounds, to write his own music using them, and by doing so introduce them
to the entire world.
Handy's first blues composition began, ironically, as a political cam-
paign song. Hired by a local politician named E. H. Crump who was run-
ning for mayor on the reform ticket. Handy wrote
campaign song called
a
"Mr. Crump." Knowing that the sporting Beale Street crowd had little
interest in being reformed, he decided that the only way to hold their inter-
est was to incorporate the "blues" sound so loved along the street into the
song. "Boss" Crump, the politician, is now long forgotten, but the compo-
sition, later retitled "Memphis Blues" and pubhshed by Handy in 1912,
became America's first published blues song. More than 60 other W. C.

Handy compositions followed, including the famous "St. Louis Blues"
(1914), "Yellow Dog Blues" (1915) and "Beale Street Blues" (1916).

98
Pee Wee's Saloon no longer stands at 317 Beale Street — it was torn down
a long time ago —but much of the old atmosphere still exists along what has
been called one of the most famous streets in the world. Old buildings line the
street, many sporting antique signs, cast-iron decorations and the shade of
wide awnings. Handy Park and the W. C. Handy Statue pay homage to W. C.
Handy's contributions to the street's fame. TheW. C. Handy Home is still
preserved to look the way that it did when Handy occupied it, although it has
been moved from its original location to an honored place at 325 Beale Street.
Not too far away stand other reminders. The Pace and Handy Music
Company, formed in 1913 and one of the first enterprises in the United States
to be wholly owned by African Americans, was at one time housed on the sec-
ond floor of the building that is now Bank at 386 Beale Street.
the Tri-State
Not far away, the Visitor Information Center at 340 Beale Street stands in the
building that was once home to the infamous Monarch Saloon in the 1920s —
known as "the castle of missing men" because it had a reputation for so many
murders. The facade of the GaUini Building, still standing at 177-181 Beale
Handy Park on Beale Street. (Courtesy of the Memphis Visitors and Convention Center)
Beale Street
99
Street, once housed a combi-
nation hotel, restaurant and
saloon but was better known
as a gamblers' playground.
The Daisy Theater at
329-331 Beale Street was
the entertainment center for
many of the great blues
artists of the 1920s. Today
the building is used as the
Blues Museum. Schwab's
department store at 163-
165 Beale Street, still oper-
ating today, has been in its
original location since

1912. And it still offers an
astonishing array of mer-
chandise from clothing and
toys to voodoo powders
and magic potions. Nearby,
too, is entertainer Willie
Mitchell's Club at 326 Beale
Street. In the 1920s, the
\n tiny Sun Studio, the first rock record, "Rocket 88," was
building housed the famous
recorded. Many stellar names followed, including B.B.
"One Minute Dairy
King and Elvis Presley. (Courtesy of the Memphis
Lunch," which lasted well
Visitors and Convention Center)
into the 1950s. In the early
1930s, the establishment boasted sales of 3,600 hot dogs per day.
Handy died on March 28, 1958, but the blues and Beale Street continued
to thrive. After Handy, others came to Beale Street to learn the roots of the
blues and to create their own sounds. The names are legendary: B. B. King,
Furry Lewis, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Alberta
Hunter and Memphis Minnie McCoy, to name only a few. In the early
1950s, a young white singer named Elvis Presley could be found sitting in the
clubs on Beale Street, listening to the music and forming the roots for his
own songs and sounds.

100
/Sv/&vyS-./^/Sv/
A CLOSE-UP W. C. HANDY HOME
The small wood-frame house at the corner of Beale and

Fourth Streets —W. C. Handy 's home in the 1910s —cap-
tures the flavor of old Beale Street at the turn of the century.
Handy's six children were born in this house and while liv-
ing here, Handy wrote many of his most famous blues

pieces.
By 1938, his musical stature had reached legendary pro-
portion, with a stirring tribute at
Carnegie Hall in New York City on
his 65th birthday. His tune "St.
Louis Blues" would become a
favorite of Queen Elizabeth and a
battle anthem Handy's
in Ethiopia.
blues passed technical features on

to hot jazz, symphonic jazz, boogie-
woogie and swing, and by mid-cen-
tury, the blues had spawned jazz,
ragtime, rock and roll and soul.
After Handy left Memphis, his
former house fell into disrepair,
was burned out and abandoned.
But in the 1980s, blues historian
Harry Godwin rediscovered the
house and spearheaded a successful
campaign to save the landmark.
On October 7, 1985, the home was
moved from 659 Jennette Street to
its present location on Beale Street, w C. Handy 1 873- 958)
1 (Courtesy of the
(
Local businesses and members of Memphis visitors and Convention Center)
Beale Street
101
the Associated Builders and Contractors donated labor and supplies to
restore Handy's house to its turn-of-the-century condition, with piano and
music stands poised as if ready for Handy's return from Pee Wee's Saloon.
Here visitors can view artifacts and memorabilia that recall the life and
music of Handy and his blues.
ÂAAA/Â/ÂAAAAAAAA^
In the 1930s, the devastating economic downturn known as the Great

Depression began to take its toll on Beale Street. By the 1950s, many of
the older buildings began to fall victim to bulldozers and changing social
traditions. While some of the old Beale Street buildings managed to sur-
vive, many were lost to history. But the musical beat along the river began
to re-emerge during the 1970s. Today, with more than $500 million dol-
lars spent on redevelopment since 1980, the cobbled-brick street called
—
Beale has come alive once more in clubs, on street corners, and in
—
Handy Park with the sounds of blues, jazz, good times and rock and
roll.
EXPLORING FURTHER
Books about W. C. Handy and the Blues
Handy, W. C. Father of the Blues: The Autobiography of W. C. Handy.
Originally published 1941. Edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Da
Capo Press, 1991.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans, 2nd ed. New York:
Norton, 1983.

102
Related Places
W. C. Handy Birthplace
620 West College Street
Florence, AL 35630
(205) 760-6434
The hand-hewn log cabin where Handy was born is would

furnished as it
have been during Handy's childhood. A museum of artifacts and memora-

bilia is housed here, as well as a resource center on black history and
culture.
Beale Street
103
Connemara i
HOME OF POET CARL SANDBURG

Flat Rock, North Carolina
AT A GLANCE
Built: ca. 1838
Home and goat ranch of Carl Sandburg from 1945 to 1967
A wood-frame house nestled among 250 acres of rolling

three-story,
pastureland and wooded hills. The grounds, which once supported the
Sandburgs' prize-winning Chikaming goat herd, are dotted with numerous
outbuildings, including a goat barn, greenhouse, barnyard, corncrib and
milk house.
Address:
The Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site

1928 Little River Road
Flat Rock, North Carolina 28731-9766
i
(704)693-4178
104
Carl Sandburg liked to keep things simple. As one of America's greatest poets, he
honed his words down to the most direct and basic truths by keeping in touch with
the people, places and events he wrote about.
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands

and goes to work.
— Carl Sandburg
Connemara. home of Carl Sandburg 1945-67

. (Phil Smith. Courtesy of the Carl Sandburg
National Historic Site)
Connemara
105
—
parents who had come

Born Galesburg,
in Illinois, to
Sweden, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) school left

there from
after the eighth
grade. But he began a self-education of first-hand experience, his
travels taking him across the breadth of the United States. He held dozens
of odd jobs; spent time wandering as a hobo; served briefly in the armed
forces during the Spanish- American War; collected folk songs; worked as a
secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and spent more than 13
years as a newspaper reporter in Chicago, Illinois. Always, he listened to the
voices of the people, observed their lives and collected their thoughts. All of
these observations found their way into his poetry and his life.
Sandburg's style both as a man and as a poet was simple, robust and
idiomatic. He believed in writing honestly, yet always keenly tuned and with
sensitivity. By 1945, when he moved into the rambling house and grounds
called Connemara in the North Carolina hills, he was not only one of
America's best-known poets but had won a Pulitzer Prize (in 1940) for his
four-volume biography of another great American who had never lost touch
with the hearts of the people —President Abraham Lincoln.
Sandburg was 67 years old when he moved to Connemara. Here, in this
250-acre spread in Flat Rock, North Carolina, he settled down with his
wife and family to write, raise goats, and spend the last 22 years of his life.
Like Sandburg himself, Connemara was basic and unpretentious. The place
was organized both for simple comfort and efficiency, a "working" place,
with Sandburg writing while his wife Lilian (the sister of the famous photog-
rapher Edward Steichen) raised and bred their prize-winning herd of goats. It
was also very much a home, and visitors today can still feel the simple warmth
of the Sandburgs' day-to-day life while touring the house and grounds.
The Sandburgs had been living in a much smaller house in Michigan,
which they had completely outgrown with their library of more than 10,000
books. They had also outgrown the surrounding acreage, thanks to the con-
tinually increasing size of Lilian's prize goat herd. So when LiHan, who man-
aged both the home and goat business, discovered the roomy house and
farmlands in North Carolina, she immediately became captivated by the mild
climate and the farm's rolling green pastures on the hillsides of Big and Little
Glass Mountains. The place had the seclusion that she knew Carl needed
space to think in silence, to ponder and to write — as well as ample room for
goats, books, three daughters and two grandchildren.

106
Today the place looks much as it did during their time, and it's easy to
see why both Lilian and Carl fell in love with Connemara and why it —
quickly became their favorite home.
The main house, with its spacious 30 rooms and porches, is simple both
in design and furnishings. Curtainless, because the Sandburgs liked to be
able to look out at the grounds and sky, its every room quietly indicates the
family's homespun and unpretentious attitudes and lifestyle. From the front
room, where Carl Hked to play his guitar and lead his family in folk songs,
to the office, where Lilian managed the farm's affairs, the image of the house
is one of comfortable and utilitarian simplicity. Overstuffed furniture of var-
ious colors, designs and ages mixes throughout the house with wooden
worktables, ceiling-high bookshelves and painted and unpainted orange-
crates, which were used for storing everything from books to records and
magazines. On the wall in Carl's upstairs bedroom are clippings of magazine
articles and family photographs, all unframed and chaotically pinned, some-
times two or three layers deep. Books and records are also scattered throughout
Carl Sandburg's upstairs study (Phil Smith Courtesy of the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site)
Connemara
107
Barnyard view at Connemara, where goats still caper (Phil Smith. Courtesy of the Carl
Sandburg National Historic Site)
the house. In Carl'sworkroom, where his typewriter still rests on a wooden

crate, manuscripts and correspondence are stacked and carefully arranged;
small throw rugs decorate the wooden floor; and a large wood stove holds
hundreds of the writer's cigar butts.
It was here Sandburg wrote of the America and the American peo-
that
ple that he loved and believed in. He told stories in poetry and prose of
what it was like to be a part of the American "community," living, work-
ing, remembering the past and hoping for the future. Here is where the
poems sprang forth, the singing lines that reminded many of another great
poet who celebrated America —Walt Whitman.
But Sandburg's work was complex than Whitman's, less "literary,"
less
formed more by the idiom of the American folk music that he loved to sing
and the tall tales that he loved to tell. Usually he wrote about the Midwest and

108
its people, its farms and its cities — its sunburned wheat harvesters and sweat-
drenched Chicago slaughterhouse workers. But always he wrote about the
collective heart of America — its hopes, dreams, pains and confusions.
Connemara was not only a writer's house but also a working farm.
—
While Carl worked at his writing, Lilian one of the outstanding pioneers
—
of the American goat industry managed most of the farming and business
activities. She organized her days around the needs of the goat herd, which
she developed from three main breeds: Saanens, Toggenburgs and Nubians.
At one time numbering more than 200, Connemara's goat herd was as
famous among goat farmers as Carl's poetry was among readers. Members
of the same breeds are still represented today by the goats living at
Connemara, tended by park rangers.
Lilian, with the help of children and farmworkers, often milked as
many as 80 goats, twice a day. Milking machines were used for most of
the goats, but the champions and prize winners were milked by hand.
Feeding, cleaning and caretaking also took up much of the busy day.
Horses, cows, chickens and hogs had to be attended to, as did the large
garden and grounds, as well as all the paperwork connected with running
a busy and successful farm. Still Lilian found time to make cheeses, yogurt
and ice cream for the family's pleasure.
Not all was work, though, at Connemara. Visitors were frequent, and
children and grandchildren spent many happy hours joining in communal
folksinging or listening to Sandburg tell stories or read his poems. Long
walks were a special pleasure, and Sandburg particularly liked to walk the
paths through the woods during the early evening, either with friends, chil-
dren or grandchildren, or just alone with his own thoughts.
At Connemara he remained as prolific a writer as he had always been,
publishing some of his most famous work, including his only novel
Remembrance Rock; his autobiography Always the Young Strangers; his
Complete Poems (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1951),
a young people's edition of his autobiography called Prairie Town Boy;
well as otherworks for children; and his last published volume of poetry,
Honey and Salt, issued on his 85th birthday.
Carl Sandburg was 89 years old when he died quietly in bed at
Connemara on July 22, 1967. At the time of his death, he was probably
America's best-known and most-loved poet.
Connemara
109
1
o Carl Sandburg
National Historic Site
0800^ 0^0 \
0% ^cpPôcTOoôoo^ 10
1 Main House
Q
2 Family Garage
3 Chicken House
4 Pump House
5 Spring House
6 Woodshed o a
7 Swedish House
8 Tenant House
9 Gazebo
10 Goat or Donkey House
1 Icehouse Site
12 Farm Manager's House
13 Greenhouse
14 Barn Pump House
15 Isolation Quarters
16 Barn Garage
17 Vegetable Garden
18 Barnyard and Corncrib
19 Buck Kid Quarters
20 Main Goat Bain f^
21 Horse Barn
22 Cowshed
O^
(^
23 Storage Shed Ô
24 Silo _ O
25Milkhouse O^ O
°^ o
SfHing Trail
to Big Glassy
^00^00
Mountain ^~y
^
^
17 \
\ o
Map of Connemara (Courtesy of the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site)

1 10 II
For Carl Sandburg, being American had much to do with Hving Hfe sim-
ply, with dignity, close to nature, close to the best of the human spirit and the
human imagination. At Connemara —with its goat herd, music, poetry, folk
songs and thousands of books — Carl Sandburg's sense of being American
can still be felt as strongly as in his poems. And, although much has changed
in the world since his day, the spirit of Connemara, like the spirit of his
poetry, is still able to move us and remind us that there can be much richness
in simplicity and much to admire in the human heart and mind.
AySv'^/S^/Svy
SINGING OF AMERICA
A CLOSE-UP CARL SANDBURG, FOLKSINGER
Although the guitar that visitors see at Connemara belongs to

one of the park rangers and is not one of Carl Sandburg's own
cherished guitars (which are stored in a less humid, climate-
controlled environment), the guitar is there to remind visitors
of Sandburg's love of American folk songs. Not only did he
spend many Connemara playing and singing
of his evenings at
folk music with his family, but he would often finish up public readings of his
poetry by singing a selection of folk songs, while he strummed one of his
favorite guitars. Although he could play only a few simple chords, his love of
the music came through and dramatic passion of his mellow bari-
in the zest
tone voice. For Sandburg, this music was the true music of America.
Since there were very few written collections of American folk songs in
Sandburg's time, most of the songs that he sang were collected verbally dur-
ing his years of wandering, some learned from fellow hoboes or from work-
ers along the roads and railway tracks. His collection was expanded by
people passing songs on to him that they had heard in their own travels or
as children listening to parents, neighbors or grandparents. Often, after one
of his public poetry readings, he would find himself sitting with small
groups of enthusiastic friends and strangers, excitedly exchanging the
CONNEMAR.\
1 1 1
Sandburg and his guitar ( Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Carl Sandburg National
Historic Site)

112 4
words and guitar chords from old cowboy songs and sea chanteys, ballads
from the Appalachian mountains or blues from the Deep South.
During the early 1920s, Sandburg recorded some of these songs for the
RCA Victor Talking Machine Company and later published a limited writ-
ten edition of the words, music and history of some of his favorites. He
expanded this collection into a full-scale book, The American Songbag,
published in 1927.
Sandburg's love and enthusiasm for the American folk song sings out
loud and strong, and today, Songbag still makes for delightful reading.
Many Sandburg admirers as well as folk song collectors and enthusiasts still
horde and cherish it along with his early recordings.

On October 17, 1968, slightly more than a year after Sandburg's death.
Congress established the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site to be
administered by the National Park Service. The buildings, rolling pastures
and mountain woods from which Sandburg once drew inspiration now
belong to the people about whom and for whom Carl Sandburg wrote for
so many years.
Park rangers maintain exhibits at the Visitors Information Center at the
park's entrance, conduct guided tours through the main house and take
care of the animals. Visitors are free to stroll throughout the rambling
grounds past the numerous outbuildings or take short hikes, such as
Sandburg often took, along the mountain trails.
EXPLORING FURTHER
Books by Carl Sandburg
Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln (6 volumes). New York: Harcourt, Brace

and Company, 1926-39.
CONNEMARA
1 13
. Always the Young Strangers, An Autobiography. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953.
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. Revised and expanded edi-
tion. With an introduction by Archibald MacLeish. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1969, 1970.
The Letters of Carl Sandburg: Edited by Herbert Mitgang. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
-. Prairie Town Boy. (A version for children of his autobiography.'
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955.
. Rootabaga Stories. (For children.) New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1922.
Books about Carl Sandburg
Niven, Penelope. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1991.
Steichen, Paula. My Connemara. New York: Harcourt, Brace &C World,
Inc., 1969.
Related Places
Carl Sandburg Birthplace

331 East Third Street
Galesburg, Illinois 61401
(309) 342-2361

114 4
Tor House and Hawk Tower
HOME OF POET ROBINSON JEFFERS
Carmel, California
AT A GLANCE
Built: House 1918-19; Tower 1920-24
Home of Robinson Jeffers from 1919 to 1962
House of granite designed by Robinson leffers, situated on a point of land

that meets the sea, he said, like the "prow and plunging cutwater" of a ship.
leffers helped build the house, which originally was small, built low to the
ground to withstand winter storms that blow in from the Pacific Ocean.
leffers continued to make additions throughout his life. Nearby stands
Hawk Tower, which he designed and built by hand for his wife, Una, with
stones he carried or hoisted from the beach below.
Address:
Tor House, Robinson leffers Memorial, 26304 Ocean View Avenue

P.O. Box 2713, Carmel, California 93921, (408)624-1813 (for reservations)
115 4
On a cliff jutting over the Pacific Ocean, Robinson ]effers built a house of rock,
rugged like the surrounding wilderness he loved. Near with his own hands
it,
he built a tower, also of stones, which he hauled from the crashing surf below.
4
He called it Hawk Tower.
All the waste of time of picking quarrels, and looking for

praise, trying to get the better of each other, being sociable,
making war, politics, bargaining, commerce, making laws and
—
making love, hatred, philanthropy writing books? Of course —
all these things are necessary, but don't you think too much
human energy goes into humanity; and the farmers who

subdue the earth, the scientists who widen horizons, even the
merely contemplative person admiring mountains have chosen
a better way? They live outward.
— Robinson Jeffers in a letter
When (1887-1962) and his wife Una discov-

Robinson Jeffers
ered Carmel, California, in 1914 they knew immediately that
they had also discovered their future home. The small sea-
coast town located at the southern end of the Monterey Peninsula in
northern California was at the time a tiny village with unpaved streets
fronting a large white sandy beach. Home to fewer than 400 permanent
residents, population blossomed during the summer with the arrival
its
of academics and their families from nearby Stanford University and

the University of California in Berkeley. Even during its busy summer
months, though, remained pretty much a small, sleepy village
it still
without streetlights. Only a few automobiles disturbed the town's

serenity.
It was an atmosphere that suited poet Robinson Jeffers well. He and Una
bought a small piece of land in 1918 for $200 and began planning and
building. In 1920, he wrote to a friend:

1 16
Hawk Tower and Tor House, home of Robinson and Una \effers (© lessica Bryant-Malikowski.
Courtesy of the Tor House Foundation)
"We have builded us a little house on the sea-cliff here. ... A delightful
place we think, cormorants on the sea-rocks in front of us, and pelicans
drifting overhead; a most graceful hill-range to the south across a neck of
water. . . . The house and garage and walls are gray granite — sea boul-
ders, like the natural outcrop of the hill. . . .
Writing years later in an article for the Carmel newspaper, Una Jeffers
recalled:
In 1919 we Tor house on a knoll where stones jutting out of the

built
treeless moor reminded us of the tors on Dartmore. Whales drifted . . .
by, spouting high and dolphins curved from the water; ... on cold
moonlit nights coyotes' voices came down on the valley wind. . . .
Tor House (the word tor meaning a high rock or a pile of rocks on a hill)
would remain the Jefferses' home for the rest of their lives. Still standing

117 4
—
proud, austere and noble today, it has come to represent the hfe, philosophy
and work of Robinson Jeffers, one of the most original and independent
poets of 20th-century America.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1887, John Robinson Jeffers
spent his early years in England and Europe before the family returned to
America to settle in California when he was 16. His father, a reclusive,
brilliant and eccentric theologian, had been intellectually demanding and
young Robin (he had dropped his first name in his childhood) was fluent
in French, German, Latin and Greek by the time he entered Occidental
College in Los Angeles. Although he had pursued postgraduate study in
medicine, astronomy and a variety of subjects in the United States and
Europe, it was as a poet that he hoped to make his mark, and after mar-
rying fellow student Una Call Kuster in 1913, the two well-matched tem-
peraments moved to Carmel in search for a good place for Robin to
work.
The rugged and brooding northern California coast suited them per-
fectly. Robin shared his father's intensely reclusive and brooding tempera-
ment, and Una, in love with Celtic lore and mythology, saw much in the
misty, craggy and fog-ridden area that reminded her of the rugged coast-
lines and desolate moors of Ireland.
Work on Tor House started in 1919. To retain the mood and integrity of
the rocky coast they had decided that the small house should be constructed
from the gray granite boulders scattered about the area. A local contractor
and a stonemason were brought in to do the actual building, but Robin
hired himself out at a few dollars a day to the stonemason so that he could
also have a hand in the construction. It was hard and demanding work
most of the huge boulders had to be dragged up from the beach and set in
place without any heavy machinery —
and it seemed to solidif}^ a frame of
mind that already had begun grow within Robin.
"As he helped the masons shift and place the wind and wave-worn gran-
ite I think he realized some kinship with it and became aware of strengths
in himself unknown before," Una wrote in 1934.

Robinson's love of the rugged grandeur of nature and his discomfort
with the weaknesses and foibles of humankind began to form the focus
of his poetry. Explaining his philosophy in a letter written in 1951, he
wrote:

list
. . . Man is a part of nature,
but a merely infinitesimal
part; the human race will
cease after a while and leave
no trace, but the great splen-
dors of nature will go on.
Built to be a part of nature. Tor

House, too, would be a source of
strength as well as a shelter against
distraction. The house consisted of a
long living room on the ground floor
with windows facing westward
toward the ocean and southward
toward the Santa Lucia Mountains
and Point Lobos. Also situated on the
ground floor were a comfortable bed-
room for the rare guest, a bathroom
and a small kitchen. A short, steep The desk of Robinson \effers. now moved tc
stairway with a trapdoor at the top Hawk Tower (Margot Grych. Courtesy of the
led to two attic rooms, one a bed- Tor House Foundation)
room for Robin and Una, the other
used later as a bedroom for their twin boys, Garth and Donnan, born in
1916. Heating the upstairs was an old Franklin stove. Robin would do his
window of the bedroom, at a simple desk
writing here, sitting by the east
and chair made from the discarded planks of an old mission. Una had her
desk downstairs, in a small nook next to bookshelves built near the front
door. Heating the downstairs was a large fireplace, which was usually kept
burning since a system of water pipes immediately behind it warmed the
water for the house. Although the house did have running water, it origi-
nally had neither gas nor electricity. Oil lamps and candles lit during the
evenings supplied the light for reading, working and household chores.
Through the years the house would grow. "I spend a couple of hours
nearly every afternoon at stone-masonry, having still much to build about
the place; or bringingup stone from the beach, violent exercise; and physi-
cally I'm harder than at any time," Jeffers wrote to a friend. While hauling
boulders, mixing mortar and building stone walls, he would use the time

1 19
Una and Robin \effers (right) with their family in the dining room at Tor House. [From the
William C. Brooks Collection at Harrison Memorial Library. Carmel California]
thinking about his poetry, feeUng himself not only in tune with but a part of
the rugged and austere surroundings that he loved so much.
The addition was a stone garage, built apart from the house itself. A
first
long, sunken dining room was also added later, connecting the main house
with the garage. The Jefferses' pride and joy, though, was Hawk Tower.
Inspired by Una and built proudly by Robin, the tower was named for
the hawks around Tor House that he loved so much and often wrote
about. Standing nearly 40 feet high, with walls nearly 6 feet thick in some
places. Hawk Tower is an imposing and brooding structure. On the
—
ground floor are two small rooms one, several feet below ground level,
was humorously referred to as the "dungeon." A narrow stairway winds
like a corkscrew up to the second floor —
a mahogany-paneled room with

120
arched Gothic windows —and from there one can move to the tower's
third level, a small turret with a marble-paved platform enclosed by bat-
tlemented walls.
As Robin wrote in 1943 to a friend, "... it seems to me that a good life
is the affair of private persons, rather than of society." And in their years
at Tor House, first with their children, and later with their grandchildren,
—
Robin and Una lived the good life a life dictated by their temperaments
and philosophical beliefs, a life dedicated to work, simplicity, an under-
standing of nature and an uneasiness with the ways of humankind. If there
was little room for the confusions of the outside world in that life, the
choice was an intentional one. "In a degenerating society the individual
has got to isolate himself morally to a certain extent or else degenerate
too," wrote Robin in 1935. "He can keep his own morals; he cannot save
society's. ..."
was a view that many of his critics found harsh, pessimistic and severe.
It
For Robinson Jeffers, though, the rocks and hawks of the rugged terrain
surrounding Tor House would always remain the most fitting symbols for
admiration.
Una Jeffers died in 1950. Twelve years later, Robinson Jeffers died quietly
in the small bed in the downstairs living room of Tor House on January 20,
1962. He was a few days past his 75th birthday.
/Â^/^/Â^.
THE SECRET TREASURES

A CLOSE-UP OF TOR HOUSE
Not all the stones that make up Tor House, Hawk Tower and
the grounds came from the Carmel, California area. Robin
and Una, as well as the twins Garth and Donnan (after they
had grown) loved to pick up interesting stones in their travels
and bring them back to use in various ways in the house and
grounds. Friends, too, often contributed their finds. Although

121
describing every unique and interesting piece would require a small booklet
(and one entitled The Stones of Tor House has been written by Donnan
Jeffers), a few can be described here.
In the garden immediately to the left of the main courtyard lies a large,
gray lava millstone. In the 1930s, Robin and Una brought it back from
Taos, New Mexico, where it had been used for many years by the Native
Americans of the famous Taos Pueblo.
In Tor House itself can be found: stones from churches and missions around
the world; a fragment from the famous meteorite crater near Flagstaff,
Arizona; various stones from locations around the British Isles; pre-Columbian
terra-cotta heads and part of an obsidian dagger from Central America; a
carved-stone Aztec mask as well as stones from North Africa, the Greek
Islands, India and Rome; a white rock from the Great Pyramid of Cheops in
Egypt; and a small bit of a wall painting from the destroyed city of Pompeii.
In the lower room in Hawk Tower, over the fireplace is a small plaque.
Embedded in it is a small piece of black lava from Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii, a
piece of white lava from Mt. Vesuvius in Italy, an Indian arrowhead dis-
covered near Lake Michigan and a small pebble picked up on the shores of
Lake Erie.
Not all of the discoveries in the tower though are stone. Climbing
upward, through the turret one can see two small weathered ship's port-
holes used as windows. One of the two, its frame octagonal in shape, was
retrieved from a ship wrecked in a storm in Monterey Bay in 1830. The
ship, named the Natalia, and earlier called Inconstant, was the one that
Napoleon had used in his daring escape from the island of Elba. Also in the
tower can be seen a red stone from Newstead Abbey, England, the home of
the poet Lord Byron.
Among other "writer's stones" inplace around the house, tower and
grounds are a stone from the manor of the novelist George Moore, a stone
inscribed to the memory of Thomas Hardy and a stone from a tower owned
by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

122
Robinson \effers at the door to Hawk Tower (Lewis losselyn. Courtesy of the Tor House
Foundation from the collection of Pat Hathaway)

123
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Robinson had planned an additional wing for Tor House, which his
Jeffers
son Donnan began building in 1957 and continued working on into the
1960s. Donnan's wife, Lee Jeffers, still lives in that part of the house. The rest
of Tor House and Hawk Tower has been preserved as a historic site by the
Tor House Foundation, which conducts tours on weekends, by reservation,
to individuals and small groups.
Today Tor House and Hawk Tower stand as monuments to the poet-
—
builder who conceived and created them evoking his love of the terrain
surrounding them, they are both symbols of his art and part of it unique, —
rugged and eloquent.
EXPLORING FURTHER
Books by Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York:

Random House, 1959.
. Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson jeffers.
Edited by Robert Haas. New York: Random House, 1987.
Books about Robinson Jeffers and Tor House
Bennett, Melba The Stone Mason of Tor House: The Life and Work
Berry.
of Robinson Jeffers. Menlo Park, California: The Ward Ritchie Press,
1966.
Jeffers, Donnan Call. The Stones of Tor House. Carmel, Calif.: Jeffers
Literary Property, 1985.

The Building of Tor House. Carmel, CA: Tor House Press, 1993.
.
Karman, James. Robinson Jeffers, Poet of California. Brownsville, Ore.:

Story Line Press, 1994.

124
Rowan Oak
HOME OF NOVELIST WILLIAM FAULKNER
Oxford, Mississippi
AT A GLANCE
Built: 840s
Home of William Faulkner from 1930 to 1962

A wooden two-story primitive Greek Revival house,
pre-dating the Civil War.
Mailing Address:
Rowan Oak,
c/o English Department
University of Mississippi, University, MS 38655
Address:
Rowan Oak, Home of William Faulkner

Old Taylor Road, Oxford, Mississippi 38655
(601) 234-3284
125
Rowan Oak, home of William Faulkner, 1930-62 (Robert lordan, University of Mississippi
News Service)

126
The people and places of Oxford. Mississippi fueled VJilliam Faulkner's rich
imagination. Rowan Oak. the home that he bought to live and work in, was the
calm center from which he viewed a world he saw as conflicted and violent.
the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace,

whatever sohtude, and whatever pleasure he can get
at not too high a cost.
—William Faulkner, in "The Writer's Chapbook"
When it
William Faulkner bought the house he called
was a rundown 70-year-old relic,
Rowan Oak,
with rotted beams, no
indoor plumbing, no electricity and no running water. But it
was a piece of old South history — built before the CivilWar and it was —
a house of own.
his
The year was 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression, and finances
were tight for everyone. But Faulkner (1897-1962) had just sold his fourth
novel, The Sound and the Fury, published in October 1929. Like most of
his stories, it was rooted in the South, part of a family saga that he invented
and began spinning out over the course of his lifetime. He had worked hard
to get what little money he had coming in —
at least, he had done a lot of
hard writing, while "working" at other odd jobs, as postmaster at the
University of Mississippi post office nearby, or shoveling coal at the univer-
sity power plant. Now he wanted a piece of land to call his own.
Desperate for a buyer, the owner offered Faulkner generous terms
$6,000 for the house (including 4 acres of land and the outbuildings) with no
down payment, and $75 monthly payments at 6 percent interest. Faulkner
wasn't sure where even that amount of money would come from, with the
unpredictable income he had from his writing. But he bought the place and
began turning out stories for magazines, which in those days paid even better
than books. He called the place Rowan Oak, after the rowan tree, symbolic
of security and peace and native to his ancestors' home of Scotland.
Rowan Oak
127
Faulkner's wife, Estelle, was not enchanted with the old, ramshackle, run-
down place, but to him it was much more. It was a place with history behind
it. African- American slaves had built the house in the 1840s for "Colonel"
Robert B. Shegog, a wealthy Irishman whose title of Colonel was purely

honorary. According to regional legend, during the war the colonel's
daughter, Judith, fell in love with a young lieutenant in the opposing Union
army, stationed nearby in Oxford. As she stole from her upstairs window
one night to elope with her suitor, she accidentally fell from the balcony to
her death at the poor lieutenant's feet. Out of respect for the young lovers,
according to the tale, the Union army spared the Shegog place, even as they
burned much of the rest of the countryside, and some local residents insist
that when the moon is full, and the shadows of the nearby woods are stark
and lonely, the ghost of the young woman still haunts the grounds. To
Faulkner, this house represented the Old South and its traditions, both
good and bad.
Faulkner's reputation has come a long way since June 1930, when he,
Estelle and her two children moved into their new home. Considered by
many to be the greatest writer the United States has ever produced, he is the
subject of more books, and articles than almost any other writer in
studies
—
history with the exception of William Shakespeare.
In his own time, though, Faulkner was not so highly praised. Most peo-
ple thought his work was too dark and violent, too pessimistic and too dif-
ficult to read. Also, many in the South thought that he presented an unfairly
pessimistic picture of southern life. Born September 25, 1897 in New

Albany, Mississippi, and raised in nearby Oxford, where he spent most of
his life, Faulkner saw the South as his own artistic battlefield. And on it he
waged a troubled war to understand the dark secrets in the hearts of the
unforgettable characters that he created, mirrored in his imagination from
what he saw around him. An instinctive writer with a sharp and painful
sensitivity to the secrets hidden within the human heart, he struggled always
for the best ways to tell his stories, often using complex techniques and
what one critic called a "panting, difficult prose." Fie probed like an
archaelogist at the aching memory of the past, and he mercilessly pursued
the present pain of its corruption.
Visitors approaching Rowan Oak, his longtime home, often find the
experience is a little like finding a door to the world that Faulkner so deeply

128
inhabited. Located just a few miles from the center of the town of Oxford,
in Lafayette County, Mississippi, Rowan Oak looks much as it did when
Faulkner lived there.A long brick walk lined with tall trees affords a stately
approach to the colonial-style portico. The house is something of a surprise,
though, to visitors who come today expecting a grand and luxurious south-
ern mansion. The columns are of planed timber, not turned wood or stone,
and the interior is simple, homey and unadorned.
To Faulkner, though, this was his own "mansion" where, after some
repair work, he could live like his great-grandfather had, writing books in
the style of a southern gentleman. That great-grandfather. Colonel William
Cuthbert Falkner (the u in the family name had been dropped but was
replaced by William Faulkner), had been a financially successful and tradi-
tional southern gentlemen who had written a best-selling novel of the old
South, The White Rose of Memphis. Colonel Falkner's rather violent and
colorful life had come to a sudden end when he was murdered in the streets
by a business rival.
Faulkner was fascinated with stories of his great-grandfather and would
later use him model for some of his characters. To the citizens of Oxford,
as
William Faulkner was something of a character himself, known to many
around town as Count No 'Count, a nickname some of the locals had given
him because of his air of distracted eccentricity' and his reputation for not
being able to "hold down a good job." Many of the local citizens in fact were
still shaking their heads over the debacle of Faulkner's three-year stand as
acting postmaster at the University of Mississippi post office in Oxford. He
had managed to secure the position in 1921 at the age of 24 but was asked
to hand in his resignation in 1924. The official complaint read in part:
That you are neglectful of your duties, in that you are a habitual reader
of books and magazines, and seem reluctant to cease reading long
enough to wait on the patrons; that you have a book being printed at the
present time, the greater part of which was written on duty at the post-
office; that some of the patrons will not trust you to forward their mail,
because of your past carelessness and these patrons have their neighbors
forward same for them while away on vacations. . .
Flow or why anyone would let himself lose such a good job was a puz-
zler for the citizens of Oxford. And why anyone would spend such time
Rowan Oak
129
—
reading books posed an even greater question to most of his neighbors. No

longer a novice, he yet a success. He had pubhshed a couple of vol-
was not
umes of poetry and few novels, but he was only just beginning to find his
a
subject as a writer. While his earlier novels explored the disillusionment of
World War I {Soldier's Pay, 1926) and the bohemian artistic hfe in the New
Orleans Latin Quarter {Mosquitoes, 1927), he had begun to consider the
advice of fellow novelist Sherwood Anderson to write what he knew best
the colorful past and people of his own area of Mississippi.
In his novel Sartoris (1929), he had begun to take Anderson's advice.
And although he had not yet hit his full stride as a novelist, in Sartoris he
had begun to open up the rich territory of his imagination. With The Sound
and the Fury (1929), which many people consider his masterpiece, his cre-
ative powers reached full strength. Soon, the world would know Oxford,
Mississippi, as his fictional town of Jefferson and Lafayette County as the
haunted Yoknapatawpha County through his forthcoming books. As I Lay
Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
Intruder in the Dust (1948) and many more novels and short stories.
In 1949 Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in literature, a heady honor,
which eased his financial problems slightly. As a result, he was able to make
several improvements to the house during the early and mid-1950s per- —
haps the most important of which was the enclosure of the rear porch on
the ground floor. This became his "office" as he called it in the tradition —
of antebellum planters who transacted their business in an office in their
mansions. Faulkner's office was a comfortable room with a fireplace and a
bed, so he could nap when writing all night. He up his writing table by
set
a window overlooking his paddock and stable and hung a painting over the
mantel —a done by his mother, of himself as an innocent-looking
portrait,
young man. This was his room. He mapped out at least one book directly
on the wall. And here he kept things in a state of clutter that made sense
—
only to him a collection of old pop-bottle caps on the table in apparent
disarray were, he explained to his daughter, exactly the way he wanted
them.
Between the office and the library was a narrow hall that Faulkner used
as a tack room, overflowing with bridles, saddles and riding boots.
Faulkner's horses were one of his passions, and long rides in the woods gave
him time for contemplation or release from a tedious day of writing. He

130
Faulkner's office. His typewriter and writing table faced the window looking out toward the
horses. (Robert )ordan, University of Mississippi News Service)
also drank, more and more, as his life continued, trying to flee the mental
anguish he felt as he tried —unsuccessfully—to reconcile his many internal
conflicts: between the old South and the new South, between the South he
loved and the cause of human rights, between his love of the rich complex-
ities of human psychology and his disillusionment with the evils of
humankind, between the ideal and the real. But alcohol brought no answers
and, more and more, it failed to dull the pain. He continued to write, how-
—
ever novels and extraordinary short stories —
until he died July 6, 1962.
Most of the rooms at Rowan Oak look today much as they did in
Faulkner's day. His office and the library, especially, give the impression
that Faulkner just stepped out for a moment. They look lived in and clut-
tered. At the time of Faulkner's funeral, fellow novelist William Styron
described the library as "a spacious, cluttered room. A goldframed portrait
of Faulkner in hunting togs, looking very jaunty in his black topper, domi-
nates one wall; next to it on a table is a wood sculpture of a gaunt Don
Rowan Oak
131
Rowan Oak
First Floor Second Floor
».- -»-»---
l^CT
1 Portico 6 Parlor 11 Porte Cochere 16 Balcony
2 Brick Terracing 7 Dining Room 12 Porch 17 Estelle's Bedroom
3 Hall 8 Back Hall 13 Jill's Bedroom 18 Storage
4 Library 9 Pantry 14 Guest Room 19 Sewing Room
5 Faulkner's Office 10 Kitchen 15 Faulkner's Bedroom
Floor plan of Rowan Oak
Quixote. Around the other

. . . walls are books, books by the dozens and
score, in random juxtaposition, in jackets and without jackets, quite a few
upside down."
Somehow it seems an appropriate setting for the rich imagination of
William Faulkner and the legacy he has left us in his work.

132
A CLOSE-UP A WORKING WALL
In 1954, Faulkner published a long novel that he had been
thinking about for a dozen years. Set in France in 1918, A
Fable transforms the events of the false armistice of that year,
the peace that did not come, into an allegory for the events of
the last days of Jesus. It was a confusing book to his readers,
and anyone who "office" can see why. There,
visits his
Faulkner mapped out book on the wall, where visitors

the outline for the
can still see it today, written in graphite pencil and brown grease pencil.
Despite its complexity, in 1954, Faulkner won the National Book Award
and the Pulitzer Prize for A Fable.
Outline of The Fable on the wall of Faulkner's office (Robert lordan. University of Mississippi)
Rowan Oak
133
lAap of [he grounds of Rowan Oak

134
^w^\/M\A/SvÂ/Â/^yÂAA/ÂA/;|

^
Faulkner deeded Rowan Oak to his daughter Jill in 1954, partially to
reduce his tax burden. When he died in 1962, Jill leased the property to the
University of Mississippi, which paid $10.00 per year in rent. Estelle
Faulkner was free to live there as many months of the year as she wanted to.
The University agreed to see to the upkeep. Faulkner's library and office
were made available to Faulkner scholars, while Estelle retained control
over the rest of the house. After 1973, when Estelle died, the general public
also began to have access to portions of the house. Eventually, Jill sold
Rowan Oak to the University of Mississippi. In 1977, Rowan Oak was
placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Fund-raising has
resulted in extensive repairs to the foundation and roof, and renovation of
the house was completed by 1980. The university began restoring the out-
buildings at Rowan Oak in 1992, many of which, including the barn, were
disintegrating. Restoration of the old kitchen —which Faulkner used as a
smokehouse —followed, as well as the stable and tenant house, both built
by Faulkner.
EXPLORING FURTHER
Selected Books by William Faulkner
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Corrected edition. New York: Random

House, 1984.
. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. Edited by Joseph Blotner.
New York: Random House, 1977.
. The Sound and the Fury. Modern Library edition. New York:
Random House, 1946.
Books about William Faulkner and His Work
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. One-volume edition. New York:

Random House, 1984.
Rowan Oak
135
Crane, John Kenny. The Yoknapatawpha Chronicle of Gavin Stevens.
Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1988.
Lawrence, John, and Dan Hise. Faulkner's Rowan Oak. Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1993.
Oates, Stephen B. William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist, a Biography.
New York: Harper & Row, 1987. •
Related Site
Faulkner House Books

624 Pirate's Alley
New Orleans, LA 701 16
(504) 51A-19A0
A marker explains that this bookstore is located in the house in

historical —
fact, in the very rooms —
where Faulkner lived and wrote in the 1920s. The
store specializes in rare and out-of-print books by Southern authors. The
surrounding French Quarter has its own unique character and has been
home to numerous other writers, including, later, Tennessee Williams (who
wrote A Streetcar Named Desire only half a block away) and Truman
Capote (who wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms in his house one block
away). When Faulkner first came to New Orleans, he stayed at the home of
writer Sherwood Anderson and his wife. Anderson and Faulkner often met
in nearby Jackson Square to discuss stories.

136
Thomas Wolfe Memorial
HOME OF NOVELIST THOMAS WOLFE
Asheville, North Carolina
AT A GLANCE
Built: Early 20th century
Home of Thomas Wolfe from 1906 to 1916
A rambling, two-story white clapboard house with a big front porch,

1 3 rooms upstairs (including the enclosed sunporches) and 10 rooms
downstairs. Used as a boardinghouse during Wolfe's boyhood years, the
place was called the Old Kentucky Home by his mother. As the basis for
a fictional boardinghouse named Dixieland, it became famous in
Wolfe's book Look Homeward, Angel.
Address:
The Thomas Wolfe Memorial

P.O. Box 7143
48 Spruce Street
Asheville, NC 28802
(704) 253-8304
137
The Old Kentucky Home. Thomas VJolfe's childhood residence (Steve Hill. Courtesy of the
Thomas Wolfe Memorial)

138
Raised in his mother's boardinghouse. lonely among the ever-changing faces of
strangers, Tom VJolfe would, for the remainder of his short life forever search for
the mystery of his lost childhood in the narrow halls and rambling rooms of the
Old Kentucky Home, the house he called Dixieland.
... it was situated five minutes from the public square, on a

pleasant sloping middleclass street of small homes and
boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed
frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms:
it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was
painted a dirty yellow.
—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
1929 thousands of Americans read those words for the first time.
In They came from a newly published novel by a young American writer
named Thomas Clayton Wolfe, a novel that would soon become a clas-
sic and its author a major American writer.
At the time, Thomas Wolfe (1900-38) was an unknown 29 year old

from North Carolina who had left his hometown of Asheville to make his
name as a writer. His book Look Homeward, Angel described his years as
a child and young adult in Asheville (the town he called Altamont in the
novel). Within a year, the writer, the town and the rambling boardinghouse
he called Dixieland, would be known by readers all across America.
Few first novels have so captured the attention of the reading public. Almost
—
overnight, Tom Wolfe ^youthful, gangly and more than 6 feet 6 inches tall —
was famous. Only nine years later he would be dead. But in those few years, he
would write much more about his childhood and youth, about his success and
young adulthood. As he spilled out thousands upon thousands of words, his
writing was both highly loved and controversial, and critics debated whether
he was a genius or an overrated and immature romantic. But always, no mat-
ter what he wrote, or what was said about him, he was a haunted man

139
haunted by memories of the past; his hometown of Asheville; his turbulent,
his
emotional family Ufe and the house that he grew up in. This house would dom-
inate his memories as it had dominated his youth and leave him forever seek-
ing an unfound peace within its unresponding walls and ungiving rooms.
Today the Thomas Wolfe Memorial sits restored and quiet on a busy
street. It is painted white (not yellow); as it actually was during Wolfe's
childhood. Wolfe's home is now surrounded by large blacktop parking lots
and is crowded by a towering, 15-story modern hotel next door. Visitors
can hear the traffic moving along Market Street, constructed behind the
ll
house in the 1920s and now lined with law offices. But when the house was
first purchased by Wolfe's mother in 1906, both the neighborhood and the
town were much different. At that time, the house was an ordinary-looking
presence in an unassuming residential neighborhood. Market Street did not
even exist. Automobiles were still rare on the sleepy little street, and chairs
on the big front porch and on the somewhat ragged lawn provided places
for boarders to sit and gossip or soak up the sun.
Tom's mother, Julia (the character Eliza Gant in Look Homeward,
Angel), was a strong-minded, ambitious and determined woman, who mar-
ried William Oliver Wolfe, a stonecutter, in 1885. The two were never
happy together. The marriage produced seven surviving children, including
Tom, the youngest, born October 3, 1900, when his mother was just past
40. His father, W. O. (Gant in Tom's book), was an unambitious, brooding
and restless man, given to drunken outbursts of Shakespearean prose and
biblical quotations. As Tom wrote, Gant had "... a strange wild form of
six feet four with cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide
of rhetoric ..." Despite this description, he was also a warm and loving
man who cared deeply for his children and for his work, and all the Wolfe
children, including Tom, returned that love. In 1904, spurred by the unhap-
piness of her marriage, her personal need for financial security and her
desire to become a business force in Asheville, Julia separated from her hus-
band. In 1906, she purchased a boardinghouse only a few blocks away.
Tom, then five years old, and nearly all the rest of her children moved there
with her. Only Mabel, W. O.'s favorite, stayed in the old home.
Almost immediately Julia began to build her life, and her children's,
around the core of her new boardinghouse. As Wolfe described her remod-
eling activities:

140
, . . had made extensive aherations: she had added a large sleeping-
she . . .
porch upstairs, tacked on two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side,
and extended a hallway, adding three bedrooms, two baths, and a water-
closet, on the other. Downstairs she had widened the veranda, put in a
large sun-parlor under the sleeping-porch, knocked out the archway in the
dining-room, scooped out a small pantry in which the family was to
, . .
eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her own occupancy.
Money was tight, though, and Julia was not the kind of a woman to
spend money needlessly, even if she had it. "The construction was after her
own Wolfe wrote, "and of the cheapest material: it never lost the
plans,"
smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and flimsy rough plastering. ..."
Caught up in her new enterprise, Tom's mother was soon preoccupied
with the care of her boardinghouse, its rooms and the boarders who soon
filled them. The children were left pretty much to fend for themselves, and
Tom soon found himself adrift, moving in those early years uneasily and
unhappily between two houses (neither of which could be any longer called
Thomas Wolfe House
1 Porch 3 Parlor 5 Kitchen 7 Family Dining Area

2 Sun Porch 4 Dining Room 6 Julia Wolfe's Bedroom 8 Bedroom
Floor plan of Thomas ôlfe House (After plans by Padgett and Freeman PA and Sims Group)

141
"home") —so close and yet so far apart, the houses of his father and his
mother.
Writing in Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe describes the effect on the
book's young hero (himself, called Eugene Gant in the novel): "Thus . . .
Eugene gained another roof and lost forever the tumultuous, unhappy,
warm centre of his home. He had from' day to day no clear idea where the
day's food, shelter, lodging was to come from, although he was reasonably
sure it would be given: he ate wherever he happened to hang his hat, either
at Gant's or at his mother's. ..."
Soon, though, Wolfe settled into one house, the boardinghouse, and
remained there throughout the increasingly lonely years of his childhood.
They were years that would leave an indelible stamp on his personality and
his writing. As he wrote:
. . . Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland. And he was again afraid to

express his shame. ... he felt thwarted, netted, trapped. He hated the
indecency of his life, and seclusion, the surrender to
the loss of dignity
the tumultuous rabble of the four walls which shield us from them. . . .
There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their own
inhabitation, no place proof against the invasion of the boarders.
Today, visitors can see the big 14-foot cement columns beneath the back
porch where Tom played as a boy, and, around front, they can cross the
expanse of porch to enter the bleak hallway and parlor, a place strewn with
dark, mahogany chairs, a piano and an organ. Electrical cords strung awk-
wardly across the ceiling feed light fixtures about the room. There, Wolfe
recalled, "In the winter a few chill boarders ... sat for hours before the
coals of the parlor hearth, rocking interminably ..." His sister Helen used
to thump out popular songs on the piano, singing along for
in the evenings
the boarders' entertainment. Today, the chairs remain drawn around the
fire as if waiting for the next set of tired bones, and visitors can still imag-
ine young Tom rifling through nearby bookcases to feed his wanderlust
with stories of faraway places. "He had heard already," he would later
write of his reading, "... the far retreating wail of a whistle in a distant val-
ley,and faint thunder on the rails."
Hard, dark wooden chairs arranged around set tables in the high-ceilinged
dining room suggest the din that Wolfe recalled when the boarders dined.

142
The front parlor, where residents whiled away the evenings and Vôlfe's sister often played music.
Note Thomas's picture in a place of honor on the piano. (Steve Hill. Courtesy of the Thomas
Wolfe Memorial)
"... the animation of feeding, the clatter of plates, the braided clamor of their
talk ..." And the small pantry where the family squeezed around a small
table at mealtime recalls the bitterness he experienced at being made to feel
that he was an intruder in his own home.
The kitchen's long worktable is still strewn with mixing bowls, rolling
pins and graters. Julia's ironing table is still propped in place across the gap
between table and the cluttered counter, all as if the day's work were just
interrupted for a moment.
This was to be the pattern for most of Tom's childhood. For despite his
mother's hopes and hard efforts to make the boardinghouse a success
efforts that demanded more and more of her attention, leaving less and less

143
Time for lunch at the boardinghouse. Boarders sat around tables, where meals were served family
style (Steve Hill, Courtesy of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial)
for her children —Dixieland would never become a stepping stone toward
bigger things. It barely managed to sustain itself financially. All of the fam-
ily, not just the young and sensitive Tom, were affected, even Tom's father,
who later became ill and weak and was taken into the boardinghouse not as
husband but as unpaying boarder. All of them found themselves confronted

by its heavy burden of confusion, despair and loneliness.
In 1916, Tom Wolfe finally left his childhood dwelling to attend classes at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Three years later at Chapel
Hill, in 1919, he first tried his hand at playwriting, which he continued later at
Harvard, where he completed his M.A. degree in English in 1922. But he even-
tually discovered that the theater was not the best place for his singular narra-
tive talents. Like his father, he was in love with language and given to violent

144
outbursts of poetic rhetoric and fancy. He also had a deeply brooding nature.
And what Tom Wolfe brooded about, wrote about and sought to find answers
for was an understanding of his past, his family and a childhood and peace of
mind that had somehow been lost in the lonely rambling rooms of Dixieland.
In the famous opening passage to Look Homeward, Angel, he set the
tone that would be forever associated with this quest:
... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all
the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not
know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into
the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his
father's heart.-^ Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent.^
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
Wolfe would return to North Carolina and Dixieland off and on over the
next few years. On the most painful of those returns, he found his much-loved
—
older brother Ben who had never managed to escape the house painfully —
dying in ". . . the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian bay-win-
dow." Tom would write of Ben's death in one of the most moving sections of
Look Homeward, Angel, describing his brother's fight for life in the upstairs
room while within Eugene (Tom), "... as he paced restlessly up and down the
hall or prowled through the house a-search for some entrance he had never
found, a bright and stricken thing kept twisting about like a trapped bird. ..."
With the publication of Look Homeward, Angel
in 1929, Wolfe was
forced once more and his childhood home in Asheville.
to confront his past
Heavily autobiographical, the book had used, not only Wolfe's home and
family as its core, but also many locations and citizens of Asheville, thinly
disguised in its pages. The novel caused an immediate sensation as well as
anger among many of those townspeople and friends who found themselves
pictured, often unflatteringly, in the book's chapters.
Tom Wolfe wrote about this experience, and later, after his death, this
account was published, one of several books to be assembled from his vast
trunks of handwritten manuscripts. Its title was You Can't Go Home Again
(1942). "Home," though, meant more than just Asheville. Wolfe was seeking

145
to create more than and hometown. His family, the
a portrait of his family
town and its something greater that he was trying to cap-
citizens represented
ture —
something about the restlessness, isolation, dreams and frustrations of
all Americans, a strange sense of alienation and nostalgia for the past that
haunts the minds and spirits of restless Americans everywhere.

In 1938, Thomas Wolfe's short, meteoric life came to an end. Stricken
with a sudden soon found to be tuberculosis of the brain, he died at
illness,
Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He was 18 days short of

his 38th birthday. His body, brought home to Dixieland for a brief memor-
ial by his mother and family, was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville.
/S^/5v/S\/9v/^.
A CLOSE-UP THOMAS WOLFE'S SUITCASE
After leaving the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

Thomas Wolfe attended Harvard to work toward an M.A.
degree and to study playwriting. Although he had some small
The Mountains, presented by the
success with his play
Harvard workshop, he soon realized that it was not as a play-
wright but as a novelist that he would have to make his mark.
Moving to New York City, he began to work on his writing while teaching
English at Washington Square College of New York University. Forever
haunted and restless, he also began the travels that would symbolize his
own sense of exile and quest, and mark the rest of his brief life.
In October 1924, he made his first trip to Europe. In 1925, on the return
voyage, he met Mrs. Aline Bernstein on board ship. The two developed a
long and stormy relationship. In 1926, he again set sail to Europe, this time
staying for a while in a flat in London where he continued work on the
novel that would become Look Homeward, Angel. He returned to New
York later that year, only to set sail for a third trip abroad in 1927.
On his return, he continued teaching at Washington Square College,
while also continuing to add more and more pages to his novel. He finished

146
his book in 1928 and whilewas being considered by a pubHsher, he once
it
again traveled abroad, spending July through December 1928 in Europe. In

October 1929, under the guiding hand of editor Maxwell Perkins, the pub-
lishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons published Look Homeward, Angel.
With his relationship with Aline Bernstein becoming more and more diffi-
cult, he resigned at Washington Square College and, obtaining a
Guggenheim Fellowship, once more sailed abroad. In December 1930,
American author Sinclair Lewis, who had just won the Nobel Prize in liter-
ature, acclaimed young Wolfe's first novel in his Nobel acceptance speech.
Now internationally famous, Wolfe was still not at peace. He had not
found the stone, the leaf, the door, the something missing that would give
him rest. In 1935, he again sailed for Europe, returning later that year. And,
a year later, in 1936, he traveled to Germany and attended the Olympic
Games. On this journey, he found himself engaged in a dangerous drunken
street brawl and became disturbed by the growing power of the Nazi Party
within the country. It was to be his seventh and last trip to Europe. In 1937,
he returned to Asheville for a short visit and managed to heal some wounds
left among the townspeople by his novel, if not the wounds of his own psy-
che. During this period, he also rented a cabin at Oteen, near Asheville, and
took a short working vacation. In 1938, after delivering a speech at Purdue
University, his wanderlust took hold once more and he began a journey
throughout the American West. In July, while in Seattle, Washington, he
fell ill. By September he was dead, his body returned to Asheville for burial.
Today in the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, Wolfe's well-traveled suitcase is

a reminder to visitors of his restless spirit and troubled and endless quest.
Â/S«.A/SwÂAAA/ÂAAAAA/?v^

By 1947, the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, recognizing the widespread
interest in Thomas Wolfe, began a movement to memorialize the Old
Kentucky Home "Dixieland." By that time, the other homes that originally
lined the block had been torn down, or would be soon, so the community
moved quickly to save the old, rambling house. In 1948, Don C. Shoemaker,

147
The Citizen, spearheaded the new Thomas Wolfe
editor of a local newspaper,
Memorial Association, which immediately began to raise money by public
subscription. It from the Wolfe
shortly succeeded in purchasing the house
heirs, and the Old Kentucky Home reopened as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial
historic site on July 19, 1949. It is maintained as the Wolfe family lived in it,
with chipped iron bedsteads on the sleeping porch and the tables in the dining
room set with odds and ends of china. The Division of Archives and History
of the North Carolina State Department of Cultural Resources manages the
site, and it became designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1972.
Books by Thomas Wolfe

Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward Angel. New York: Simon &: Schuster,
1981.
. You Can't Go Home Again. New York: HarperCollins, 1981.
. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe. Edited by Elizabeth Nowell. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956.
The Letters of Thomas Wolfe to His Mother. Edited by C. Hugh
Holman and Sue Fields Ross. By arrangement with Charles Scribner's
Sons. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
Books about Thomas Wolfe

Donald, David Herbert. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987.
Related Site
Playmakers Theatre
The University ofNorth Carohna at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
Considered one of the masterworks of New York architect Alexander Jackson
Davis, this Greek Revival building serves as the theater for the Carolina Play-
makers, whose alumni include Thomas Wolfe, as well as comedian Andy
Griffith and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green.

148
MORE PLACES TO VISIT
chapters of this book explore only a few of the hundreds of his-

The toric sites that commemorate aspects of the development of literature
—
and the arts in America. Following is a list still by no means
—
exhaustive of additional key historical places that reflect focus on litera-
ture and the arts in the United States.
Northeastern States
Robert Frost Farm National Fiistoric Landmark

Route 28
Derry, NH 03038
(603)432-3091
Maintained by the New Hampshire Division of Parks and Recreation, this
is the place where Robert Frost farmed, lived, and wrote from 1900 to
1911, completing his first two books of poetry here and part of his third
(although all were published later). A nature trail through the farm is anno-
tated in park brochures with notes about Frost's life on the farm and pas-
sages from his poetry. Visitors can also see the house where he lived, which
has been restored with the active involvement of his daughter, Lesley Frost
Ballantine.
Longfellow National Historic Site
105 Brattle Street

Boston, MA 02138
(617) 876-4491
As young poet and language professor at Harvard University, Henry

a
Wadsworth Longfellow became a lodger in a room of this house in 1837,
149
latermarrying Fanny Appleton, whose father owned the house and gave it
to the Longfellows as a wedding present. Longfellow lived here until his
death in 1882. Dating back to the pre-revolutionary period, the house
served as headquarters for General George Washington in 1776. Visitors
can view Longfellow's oval sitting desk, as well as the standing desk at
which he most often wrote. From the standing desk one can also view the
Charles River from which he often drew inspiration.
Arrowhead National Historic Landmark

Home Herman Melville
of
780 Holmes Road
Pittsfield, MA 01201
(413)442-1793
From 1850 to 1863, this house was home to the author of Moby Dick,
which he wrote here, along with several other works. Visitors can view
Melville's studyand desk, complete with quill pens; the sparsely furnished
Chimney Room and its hearth; the piazza that he added to the home; and
the view of whale-shaped Mount Greylock that Melville could see from his
piazza and writing desk.
The Mount: Edith Wharton Estate

U.S. 7
Lenox, MA 01240
(413)637-1899
Located south of Lenox on U.S. 7, the lavish home of Pulitzer Prize-winning
novelist Edith Wharton reflects her sophisticated tastes. Wharton's work
provides a unique, ironic portrayal —from an insider's viewpoint —of New
York City's pre-Civil War high society. Her most successful book, Ethan
Frome (1911), is uncharacteristic; it is the story of tragic love in a New
England farm community.
Mid-Atlantic States
Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site
532 North Seventh Street

Philadelphia, PA 19123
(215) 597-8780

150
1
Poe lived here from 1843 to 1844, with his wife, Virginia, (who was also
his cousin), his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, (who was also his aunt),
and their cat, Catterina. But so few personal details exist about Poe's
day-to-day life that little reconstruction has taken place, although histo-
rians have tried to detect which of several layers of wallpaper and paint
might have been in place when he lived there. So far they don't know the
answers, and visitors have to use their imagination when touring the site.
Rangers, however, are a fountain of information about Poe's work, a
slide show is available at the visitor center, and a visit to the site is well
worth the time.
Walt Whitman House Historic Site
330 Mickle Street

Camden, NJ 08103-1126
(609) 964-5383
This two-story frame town house home ever owned by poet Walt
is the only
Whitman, purchased in 1884. Visitors can view the home, furnished with
period furniture and containing many artifacts belonging to the man known
as America's "Good Gray Poet."
Olana
RD 2 (mail)
Off Route 9G
Hudson, NY 12534
(518) 828-0135
Open Wednesday to Sunday, April 15 to October 31
Hudson River School Church helped his architect design

painter Frederick
this elaborate, Moorish-style house. Built on a hilltop overlooking the
Hudson River, Olana contained a painting studio but came to be a work of
Church's art in its own right. He moved trees and built roads so that they
would better frame one's view of the river and countryside. One can tour
the house or walk trails on the grounds.
More Places to Visit

151
Southeastern States
Zora Neale Hurston Museum of Art

227 East Kennedy Boulevard
P.O. Box 2586
Eatonville, FL 32751
(407) 647-3307
This museum and nearby Zora Neale Hurston Memorial Park and Marker
(11 People Street)commemorate the Ufe and work of writer and folklorist
Hurston, who was born and raised in this town, the first incorporated all-
black town in the United States. She later returned to Eatonville, where she
wrote and set much of her fiction. Hurston's anthropological studies of her
racial heritage influenced many Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930s,
as well as later writers, including Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker and Toni
Morrison.
Midwestern States
Paul Lawrence Dunbar House
219 North Summit Avenue
Dayton, OH 45407
(513) 224-7061
Purchased with proceeds from Dunbar's poetry, this house was his home
during the final years of his life until his untimely death in 1906 at 34, by
which time his renown was widespread. In 1924, he was voted one of the
ten greatest African Americans by a poll of the American Federation of
Negro Students, although more recently (and in his own mind) he has
been criticized for his reliance on dialect to convey African-American
themes. Visitors find his home much as he left it —including his desk,
typewriter, books and belongings, among them a him by

bicycle given to
his friends theWright brothers and a ceremonial sword presented to him
by President Theodore Roosevelt. ^
Scott Joplin State Historic Site

2658 Delmar Boulevard
St. Louis, MO
63013
(314)533-1003

152
Musician Scott Joplin had the entire nation tapping its toes with his ragtime
compositions and was already famous for his "Maple Leaf Rag" by the
time he moved in 1900 with his bride, Belle Hayden, to 265 8 A Morgan
Street (now Delmar Boulevard). The three years that he lived here were
among the most productive of his tragically short life, and he wrote some of
his most famous compositions here, including "March Majestic," "Ragtime
Dance," "Elite Syncopation," and "The Entertainer."
The James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home

528 Lockerbie Street
Indianapohs, IN 46202
(317)631-5885
Riley, whose poetry evokes a rural and small-town Indiana life that no
longer exists, lived in this charming Victorian house during the last 23 years
of his life, until his death in 1916.
Southwestern States
Painted Desert Inn

Petrified Forest National Park
P.O. Box 2217
Petrified Forest National Park, AZ 86028
(520) 524-6228
This historic inn, now a museum, exhibits a particularly artistic Spanish-

pueblo Revival architecture, with striking interior spaces. The former
Trading Post Room is illuminated by translucent skylight with multiple
panes of glass painted in designs of prehistoric Pueblo Indian pottery.
Additionally, exceptional murals of Native American life, completed in
1948, are among the last ever painted by renowned Hopi artist Fred
Kabotie (Kavotay). The museum also offers visitors an opportunity to see
Native American craftspeople at work.
Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation

Abiquiu, NM
87510
(505) 685-4539
By appointment only
More Places to Visit

153
Artist Georgia O'Keeffe spent 35 years of her life living and painting in this
rambUng, hilltop adobe house. Visitors can tour the house and/or the
grounds.
Western States
Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site

P.O. Box 280
Danville, CA
94526
(510) 838-0249
By appointment
"Before O'Neill," a critic once wrote, "there was American theater; after
O'Neill, there was American drama." At house
this Spanish-mission-style
in Northern California, O'Neill spent the last years of his life and wrote
some of his greatest plays: Long Day's Journey Into Night, Moon for the
Misbegotten, and The Iceman Cometh. On tours arranged by appointment,
visitors can view the interior of the main building, including the play-
wright's isolated study, and the beautifully landscaped grounds.
Jack London State Historic Park

2400 London Ranch Road
Glen Ellen, CA 95442
(707) 938-5216
In 1910 on author of The Call of the Wild (1903) and The

this property, the
Sea Wolf {1904) began construction of his dream home, which he called
Wolf House. The night before he and his wife, Charmian, planned to move
into the new stone structure, a fire consumed it, and only the shell of stone
walls and chimney remains. Devastated by the loss, London never

attempted to reconstruct it, instead adding a study to the house down the
hillwhere they had been living. However, visitors can hike or drive to the
charred hull and can visit the house Charmian built after London's death,
where many of his personal belongings and memorabilia are displayed. And
they can hike along a trail through the heart of London's beloved 1,400-
acre Beauty Ranch in the rolling golden Sonoma County hills, past out-
buildings that the park is still reconstructing.

154
MORE READING SOURCES
n addition to the suggested readings at the end of each chapter of this

book, the following list provides additional suggestions for exploring
I further.
Betts, Glynne Robinson. Writers in Residence: America's Authors at Home.
Introduction by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. New York: Viking Press,
1981. Visits the homes of 38 American authors, beautifully illustrated
with photographs by the author.
Kramer, Dale. Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the 1900-1930
Midwest. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966.
Reynolds, David Walt Whitman's America:
S. A Cultural Biography. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Roth, John K., ed. American Diversity, American Identity: The Lives and
Works of 1 45 Writers Who Define the American Experience. New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1995. An excellent cross-cultural resource discussing
biographies and works of writers from America's earliest days to the present.
Schultheiss, Flory Jones, ed. America in Literature: The Small Town. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979. Small-town life in America
explored by writers as diverse in time and style as 19th-century western
writer Bret Harte and 20th-century novelist Joyce Carol Oates.
Stern, Adele. America in Literature: The City. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1979. American city life through the eyes of American
authors.
Taylor, William R. In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New
York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
155
!
Index
Italic page references indicate illustrations.
Orchard House remodel- Aspet (Saint Gaudens

mg 15, 17 home) 52, 56
Absalom, Absalom! 130 Alcott, Anna 16, 17 at a glance 50
Adams, Henry 57 Alcott, Elizabeth Sewall Little Studio 54
Adams, Marion 57 16, 17 refurbishing 55
Adams Memorial 57, Alcott, Louisa May 15, 24 Studio of the Caryatids
57-58 at her desk 21 55
Adler and Sullivan 74 books by 25 Associated Artists 30
Adventures of Huckleberry Civil War work 20
Finn 31, 32 education 18, 20
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, teaching in Boston 16 B
The 31 Alcott Memorial Associa- Ballantine, Lesley Frost 149
Alabama 103 tion, Louisa May 24 Horn 63
Battle of Little Big
Alcott, Abigail May 17 Alcotts, books about the 25 Baxter, Anne 80
marries Ernest Nieriker Always the Young Strang- Beale Street
23 ers 109 at a glance 95
Orchard House room American Songbag, The Historic District 96,
24 113 99-100, 102
watercolorist 23 Amor Caritas 54 in the 1940s 97-98
Alcott, Abigail May (Mar- Anderson, Sherwood 130, Belfield 1
mee) 17-18 136 at a glance 1
Alcott, Amos Bronson Arapaho warriors 63 fish pond 7-8

educational philosophy Arizona 71, 77-78, 153 grounds of 8
of 15-17 Arrowhead National His- interior renovations 9
founds Concord School toric Landmark 150 landscaping 3, 7-8
of Philosophy 22 Asheville, North Carolina National Historic Land-
founds Temple School 145, 147-148 mark 12
16 As I Lay Dying 130 preservation of 11-12
nature of 20-21 Aspet, France 51 view of grounds 2
157
1
view of main house 4 Cather Pioneer Memorial D

Bernstein, Aline 146, 147 and Educational Founda-
tion, Willa 92
Daisy Theater 100
"Best Years, The" 88
Davis, Alexander Jackson
Bissell, Richard M. 39 Cherokee warriors 63
148
Black Eagle, Chief 64 Child, Lydia Maria 15
Day, John Calvin 39
Bland, Bobby "Blue" 100 Church, Frederick 151
Day, Katharine Seymour 39
Bletzer, Jeanne T. 77 Civil War
Diana 57
blues (music) 98 aftermath 29
Dixieland 139
books about 102 L. Alcott and 20
Blues Museum 100 W Homer and 44,48
Driftwood 46
Dunbar, Paul Lawrence 152
Borthwick, John 76 Clemens, Clara 40
35, 36,
Dunbar House, Paul
Borthwick, Mamah 75-76 Clemens, Jean 35,36
Lawrence 152
Clemens, Livy 28, 35-36
Borthwick, Martha 76
Clemens, Samuel Lang-
Bowdoin College Museum
of Art 49
horne See Twain, Mark
Clemens, Susy 35, 36
Bozeman Trail 63
Clemens family 29 Eight Bells 45
Buffalo Bill Historical Cen-
Clemm, Maria 151 "Elite Syncopation" 153
ter 70
Cody Firearms Museum 70 Emerson, Edward 18
Buntline, Ned 65
Complete Poems, Sand- Emerson, Ralph Waldo 17,
burg 109 18,26

Concord, Massachusetts, Home 25
map of 19 The"
"Entertainer, 153
Concord School of Philoso- Ethan Frome 150
California 115, 116, 124, phy 22,24 extinct animals, Peale and
154 reopened 25 10-11
Call of the Wild, The 154 Connecticut 27, 39
Campbell, Robert 72, 82 Connemara 105, 111
Capote, Truman 136 at a glance 104
Cather, Willa Sibert 85 barnyard 108 Falkner, William Cuthbert
books, articles about description 107-108 129
and by 92-93 goatherd 109 Falling Water76-77
early hfe 86-87, 88-89 upstairs study 107 Farragut, David Glasgow
her own room 91-92 Conversations with Chil- 53
Cather childhood home, dren on the Gospels 16 Farragut statue 53-54
Willa 87, 90 Copley, John Singleton 3 Faulkner, Estelle 128, 134
at a glance 84 Peale study with 6 Faulkner, Jill 134
description 88-89 Cox, Kenyon 54 Faulkner, William 125
Willa'sroom 91-92 Crazy Horse, Chief 63 books about 135-136
Cather Historical Center, Crump, E. H. 98 books by 134
Willa 92,93-94 Custer, George Armstrong buys Rowan Oak 127
Cather Memorial Prairie, 63 early Hfe 128
Willa 85, 94 Cuvier, George 1 as postmaster 129
LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

158
prizes 130, 134 Handy Park, Beale Street Hunter, Alberta 100
writing 130 99, 102 Hurston, Zora Neale
Faulkner House Books 136 Handy Statue, W. C. 99, 151-152
Fisher, William Logan 1 101 Hurston Memorial Park and
Florida 151-152 Harper's Magazine 43—44 Marker, Zora Neale
Flower Fables 20 Harris, William Torrey 24 151-152
Fog Warning 45 Hartford Fire Insurance Hurston Museum of Art,
Frost, Robert 149 Company 39 Zora Neale 151-152
Frost Farm National His- Hawk Tower 116,117
toric Landmark, Robert at a glance 115
149 building 120-121 I
Fuller, Buckminster 77 Jeffers at door to 123

Martin 82 Iceman Cometh, The 154
Fuller, Jeffers' desk in 119
Illinois 83, 114
treasures in 121-122
Imperial Hotel, Tokyo 76
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 26
Independence Hall 13
Hendrix, Jimi 96
Independence National His-
Gall, Chief 63 Hesselius, John 5
toric Park 13
Glided Age, The 30 Hillside Chapel 22
Indiana 153
Godwin, Harry 101 Home Monthly 87
Intruder in the Dust 130
great chain of being theory Homer, Charles 42-43
10 Homer, Charles Savage 43
Green, Paul 148 Homer, Winslow 47
J
Griffith, Andy 148 at home 46
Guerrero, Pedro77-78 books about 48-49 Jeffers, Donnan 119,121,

Guggenheim Museum, Solo- buys studio 42-43 124
mon R. 79-80, 83 early life 43-44 Jeffers,Garth 119,121
Gulf Stream, The 45,47-48 in Europe44 Jeffers,John Robinson 116
Gutenberg Project painting The Gulf at door to Hawk
Mark Twain books 39 Stream 47,47-48 Tower 123
Willa Gather books 93 privatizes his life 44^5 books about and by
works on display 49 124
Homer House, Winslow building Tor House
H 43,46 118-121
Handy, William Christopher at a glance 41 desk 119
(W. C.) 101 preservation of 48 early life 118
books about 102 Honey and Salt 109 Jeffers, Lee 124
early life 96 Hoover, Jake 64 Jeffers, Una Call Kuster
in Memphis 97 Hospital Sketches 20 116, 117, 118, 119, 121

playing the blues 98 Howells, Wilham Dean 33 Jeffers Memorial, Robin-
Handy Birthplace, W C. describes Twain House son 115
103 30 Jefferson, Thomas 3
Handy Home, W C. 99, Huggins' Folly 50, 51, 54 Johnson Wax Company
101-102 renamed Aspet 55 headquarters 77
Index
159
1
Joplin, Belle Hayden M New Jersey 151

152-153 New Mexico 153
Joplin, Scott 152-153 Maine 41,48,49 New York 49, 151
Joplin State Historic Site,
mammoth, pursuit of the
Nieriker, Ernest 23
152-153 10-11 Nieriker, Louisa May
Scott
"Maple Leaf Rag'; 152 "Lulu" 23-24
"March Majestic" 153 North Carolina 104, 113,
Marin County civic center
K 80
137, 147-148
Kabotie, Fred 153 Massachusetts 14, 19,

King, Albert 100 25-26, 59, 149-150
King, B. B. 100 McClure's Magazine 87
Ohio 152
Kingswood School 39 McCoy, Memphis Minnie
O'Keefe, Georgia 153
100
O'Keefe Foundation, Geor-
Melville, Herman 150
gia 153
Mencken, H. L. 88
Olana 151
Metropolitan Museum of
La Farge, John 57 Old Kentucky Home 137,
Art 49
Lakota warriors 63 138, 148
Mississippi 125
La Salle Universit)' 8,10-11 front parlor 143
University of 134
Lathrop, George P. 30 life in 142-144
Missouri 40, 152-153
Leary, Katy 35 remodeling 141
Moby Dick 150
Lewis, Furry 100 Wolfe's description of
Montana 60
Lewis, Sinclair 147 139
Montana Federation of Gar-
Life on the Mississippi 3 Old Manse, The 26
den Clubs of Great Falls
O'Neill, Eugene 154
Light in August 130 68
O'Neill National Historic
Lincoln, Abraham, statue
Moon for the Misbegotten
Site, Eugene 154
of 51, 54, 56 154
Little Women 15, 20, 22 One of Ours 87
Mosquitoes 130
London, Jack 154 O Pioneers! 88
Mount, The: Edith Wharton
Orchard House
London State Historic Park,
Estate 150
Alcott family spirit
Jack 154 Mountains, The 146
17-18,20-22
Long Day's Journey Into
My Antonia 88
Alcotts at 16
Night 154
at a glance 14
Longfellow, Fanny Apple-
description 14—15
ton 150
N Louisa May's room 21
Longfellow, Henry
May's room 24
Wadsworth 149-150 National Gallery of Art 49
preservation of 24-25
Longfellow National His- Native American tribes 63
toric Site 149-150 Nebraska 84, 91, 93-94
Look Homeward Angel State Historical Society
139, 142, 145, 146-147 92

Lothrop, Harriet 24-25, 26 New Hampshire 50, Pace and Handy Music
Louisiana 136 58-59, 149 Company 99

160
Paine, Albert Bigelow Prairie Town Boy 109 studio fireplace 67-68,
32-33, 37 Presley, Elvis 100 69
Painted Desert Inn 153 Prout's Neck Association 48 Russell, Charles Silas 62
painting as craft 5 Russell, Elizabeth Mead 62
paleontology, Peale and Russell, Jack 67
10-11 Russell, Nancy Cooper
Pavelka, Jim 91 65-67
"Ragtime Dance" 153
Peale, Charles 4 moves to California 68
Red Cloud, Nebraska 86,
Peale, Charles Willson Russell Memorial, Charles
88
books about 12 at a glance 60
restored 91, 92
compared to Benjamin home 62
Remembrance Rock 109
Franklin 4 Nancy supervises
Remington, Frederic 70
establishes museum 6, 7 65-67, 68
Revolutionary War 6
inventions 3
Rhode Old West in 61-62
Island 13
landscaping Belfield 7-9 Russell Museum Complex,
Riley, James Whitcomb 153
love for Belfield 2, 3-4
Riley Museum Home, James CM. 68
painting 6-7
Whitcomb 153
paintings displayed 13
Rittenhouse, David 9
Revolutionary War and Robinson, Angelica Kauff-
6 mann Peale 3
saddlery apprenticeship Sadilek, Annie 91
Roosevelt, Eleanor 58
5 Rowan Oak Saint Gaudens, Augusta F.
126, 127-128,
studying painting 5-6 129 Homer 52, 53
talent with handwork 5 at a glance 125 preserving Aspet 58
Peale, Hannah 3, 9 Faulkner's office 131, Saint Gaudens, Augustus 50
Peale, Margaret Triggs Mat- 131-132 Adams Memorial
thews 4, 5 floor plan 132 57-58
Peale, Raphaelle 3 grounds 135 books about 59
Peale, Rembrandt 3 improvements to buys Huggins' Folly 51
Peale, Rubens 3 130-131 early life 51-52
Peale, Titian Ramsay 3 outline of The Fable in Europe 52, 53, 55
Pee Wee's Saloon 98-99 133 Farragut commission
Pennsylvania 1, 11-12, preservation of 134 53-54
150-151 Russell, Charles Marion 61 marriage 53
Academy of Fine Arts 6 befriends Chief Black photo, 1880 55
Perkins, Maxwell 147 Eagle 64 Shaw Memorial 56
Peters, Wesley 77 books about 69-70 Saint-Gaudens, Bernard
Plains Indian Museum 70 earlylife 62-63 Paul Ernest 51
Playmakers Theatre 148 in his studio 66 Saint Gaudens, Homer 51
Poe, Edgar Allan 150-151 paintings begin to sell Saint Gaudens, Mary
Poe, Virginia 151 65 McGuiness 51
Poe National Historic Site, paintings on display 70 Saint Gaudens Memorial
Edgar Allan 150-151 as roving cowboy 64 56,58
Index
161
Saint-Gaudens National His- Stones of Tor House, The Huckleberry Finn criti-
toric Site 53, 55-56, 111 cism 32

58-59 Stormfield House 36-37 inventions 33
Sandburg, Carl 106, 111 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 30, library fireplace game
books about and by 33 37,39
113-114 Stuart, Gilbert 3 world tour 36
folksinger 111, 112, Birthplace 12-13 writing at Orchard
113 portrait of G. Washing- House 31, 35-36
on slang 105 ton 12 Twain Boyhood Home,
study 107 Styron, William 131 Mark 40
writing 108-109 Sun Studio 100 Twain House 27-40,31
Sandburg, Lilian 106, 109 at a glance 27
Sandburg Birthplace, Carl billiard room 35-36
114 building of 29
Sandburg Home National decorating of 30

Taliesin East 75-76, 82, 83
Historical Site, Carl 104, family on porch 29
Taliesin West 72, 73, 77-79
110, 113 floor plan 34
at a glance 71
Sartoris 130 George, the butler 33
bell tower 81
Seated Lincoln 56 guests at 33
desert apprenticeship
Sea Wolf, The 154 library fireplace 37, 38,
80-81
Shaw Memorial 56, 58, 59 39
entrance 78
Shegog, Julia 128 preservation of 39
living area 79
Shegog, Robert B. 128 School Room 33
Wright Foundation head-
Henry 33
Sheridan, Philip
sense of Clemens in
quarters 81-82
30-31
Sherman, William Tecum- Temple School 16
seh 33
sold 36
Tennessee 95, 101-102
Twain Memorial Commit-
statue 54 Thoreau, Henry David 17
Shoemaker, Don tee, Mark 39
C. cabin at Walden Pond
147-148 26
24-25
Sidney, Margaret
Sitting Bull, Chief 63
Tor House
at a glance
117
115
w
snuff mill, first American 13 books about 124 Walden Pond State Reserva-
Soldier's Pay 130 Jeffers family 120 tion 26
Song of the Lark, The 88, symbolizing Jeffers Warner, Charles Dudley 30
91 117-119, 121 Washington, 49DC
Sound and the Fury, The treasures in 121-122 Washington, George 6, 7,
127 Tor House Foundation 124 12

Staircase Group, The: Twain, Mark 57 Waters, Muddy 100
Raphaelle and Titian Ram- books about and by 40 Wayside "Home of
say Peale I 6-1 builds Stormfield 36 Authors" 26
Standing Lincoln 54 character of 33 Webster & Co., Charles L.
Stevens, Wallace 85 Halley's comet and 37 36
Stevenson, Robert Louis 54 on his house 28 West, Benjamin 6

162
63-64
West, settling the first novel 139-140 personal life 75-76
Wharton, Edith 150 suitcase 146-147 rebuilds Taliesin 76
White Rose of Memphis, Wolfe, William Oliver 140 view of self 72, 77
The 129 Wolfe Memorial, Thomas vision develops 76-77
Whitman, Walt 108, 151 138, 140 See also 0\d
Wright, lovanna 76
Whitman House Historic Kentucky Home Wright, Miriam Noel 76
Site, Walt 151 at a glance 137
Wright, Olgivanna Ivanovna
Whitney Gallery of Western dining room 144
Lazovich 76, 80
Art 70 floor plan 141
Wright Archives, Frank
Williams, Tennessee 136 front parlor 143
Lloyd 82
Wisconsin 83 Wolfe Memorial Associa-
Wright Foundation, Frank
Wister, Sarah Fisher 11 tion, Thomas 148
Lloyd 81-82
Wister, William 11 Woolf, Virginia 91
Wolfe, Ben 145 Wright, Catherine 77 Wright Home and Studio,
Frank Lloyd 83
Wolfe, Helen 142 Wright, Catherine Tobin 74
Wolfe, Julia 140 Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architec-
remodeling boarding- apprentices and 80-81 ture, Frank Lloyd 82
house 141 Archives 82 Wyoming 70

Wolfe, Mabel 140 books about and by 82
Wolfe, Thomas builds Taliesin West
adrift 141-142 77-79
alienation, writing life and work 72-74
144-146
about multimedia on 82
books by and about in Oak Park 74-75 You Can't Go Home Again
148 organic architecture 75 145
Index
163
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
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llT[llllTUI{[anilthemS
—
The study of historic places what happened at a particular site and how the lives of the people
there were affected —
has emerged as a great way to approach history, to "relive" the experience
and open up the immense diversity of American culture. Every community and region is rich
in such places — places that highlight real stories about real people and events.
Each book in Facts On File "s exciting new American Historic Places, will take the
series,
reader to 10 to 12 such places grouped around a common theme. The sites have been carefully
chosen to bring out the interdisciplinary nature of the study of historical places; the narratives
emphasize multicultural themes.
All the sites featured in the series can be visited today, making each volume a unique
guidebook for the traveler or a fascinating reading book for the armchair traveler. In either
case, this series shows the value and excitement found in using actual sites as tools for learning
about history.
and the Arts brings the history of literature and the arts in the United States to
Literature
through the study of related historical places. Offering a rich and detailed tour through the
life
homes and studios of important American artists, writers, and musicians, this volume visits
and explores:
Belfield farm of painter Charles Willson Peale, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Orchard House, where author Louisa May Alcott and her family lived in Concord,
Massachussetts
Twain House, home of author-humorist Mark Twain, in Hartford Connecticut
The house and studio of painter Winslow Homer in Prout s Neck. Maine
Aspet, home and studio of sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens, in Cornish, New
Hampshire
Painter Charles M. RusselFs house and studio in Great Falls, Montana
Taliesin West, home and studio of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in Scottsdale, Arizona
Author Willa Gather's childhood home in Red Cloud Nebraska
Beale Street, the spiritual home of W. C. Handy and the blues, in Memphis, Tennessee
'^ Connemara, the house where poet Carl Sandburg resided in Flat Rock, North Carolina
Tor House and Hawk Tower, home of poet Robinson Jeffers, in Carmel, California
Rowan Oak, the home of novelist William Faulkner, in Oxford Mississippi
Writer Thomas Wolfe's residence in Asheville, North Carolina
Other books in the American Historic Places series include:
The African-American Experience

The American Indian Experience
Early Settlements
Political and Social Movements
Science and Invention
Ray Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser have written numerous books, including Facts On
File's series On the Shoulders of Giants, Space Exploration, and Connecting a Continent.
Cover photograph: Orchard House. ISBN 0-8160-3401-X

Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott 90000
Memorial Association.
Cover design by Dorothy Wachtenheim
780816"034017 Facts On File, Inc.

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AMERICAN HISTORIC PLACES

TURE and the URTIi

Literature and the Arts

Ray Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser

Facts On File, Inc.

American Historic Places: Literature and the Arts

Facts On File, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spangenberg, Ray, 1939-

Text design by Cathy Rincon

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

L memory of Lloyd Spangenburg

uncle, friend and mentor

WILLA GATHER PIONEER MEMORIAL 84

TOR HOUSE AND HAWK TOWER 115

ROWAN OAK 125

THOMAS WOLFE MEMORIAL 137

More Places to Visit 1 49

More Reading Sources 1 55

History doesn't have to be dry or stuffy. And it isn't exclusively about

lowed by a section recapping how the site came to be a protected historic

Literature and the Arts

would like to thank them all, including Caroline Wistar

and Pat Connolly of La Salle University, Joseph Dryfhout at the

Nicole Bowen; and to James Warren, who helped us conceptualize the

Writers and have always had a love-hate relationship with

the societies inwhich they lived. And American writers and

Literature and the Arts

Home and farm of Chades Willson Peale from 1810 to 1821

Noted for his portraits of George Washington and other prominent

The original property spanned 104 acres located on the outskirts of

A sort of "American Leonardo," Charles W/7/son Peak was an artist, inventor,

Peale loved in life

— Charles Willson Peale in his autobiography, writing

Literature and the Arts

Beifield main house L^.; .ersity. Philadelphia, Penn.

painters of the colonial and early federal periods of American history.

Literature and the Arts

first to exhibit animals in this —

Literature and the Arts

cate aspect of nature, pondering, as he wrote in his autobiography:

being watching you. It turns around a twig or part of a flower to avoid

In an illustrated letter to his son Rembrandt, who was away studying in

Fence » * Stone Path ^^— Wall . Irrigation System

still can be seen today.

Literature and the Arts

A CLOSE-UP THE MASTODON

Perhaps Charles Willson Peale's greatest contribution to

David Rittenhouse had asked him to sketch an enor-

nected in sequence, as if in a chain, and would remain so for eternity. To

Literature and the Arts

commotion, sending bone and correspondence to luminaries, such as

PRESERVING IT FOR THE FUTURE

Books about Charles Willson Peale

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.

Gilbert Stuart Birthplace

Literature and the Arts

Independence National Historic Park

A 40-acre park in downtown Philadelphia that includes, among other his-

A 1 7th-18th century wood-frame manor (main) house and L-shaped tenant

from the middle ages and dropped it down in Concord.

—Author Lydia Maria Child, contemporary of the Alcott