for seven hundred dollars, and
Lennard's license was gone, along
with much else, including, after
another year, my apartment itself.
Life gave me the opportunity to
explore writing without a setting—
which is to say I was homeless—
and I discovered that it is impossible.
A writer, as Virginia Woolf famously
pointed out, needs a room as much
as a mind: without the former,
concentration dissolves. And writers,
permeable observers of the world and
its chaos, need thick skins in order
to insulate, organize and process
whatever they experience. Rooms
are filters, rooms are skin. Reader,
indulge my personal prologue;
American Writers at Home is a book
I take seriously—and personally.
American Writers at Home studies
the houses of twenty-one writers,
many but not all from the 19th
century, and includes the dwellings
of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily
Dickinson, Washington Irving, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick
Douglass, Edith Wharton, Eugene
O'Neill and Ernest Hemingway,
among others.
HYLAND
...she
believed
that rooms
should be
distinctive
yet flow
into one
another
naturally...
Next page: Wharton
