writers' homes

Revised blog post*

Winding our way down into Maine from the Canadian Maritime provinces, we followed the twists and turns along the coast and its many inlets, sipping coffee and soaking up the mellow mood. We were looking for the home of the late E.B. White but, coffee being what it is, bathrooms became higher priority than roadsigns.

"What's to see?"

That's the question Calvin Trillin asked in a New Yorker article a number of years ago, about author's homes as tourist attractions. "The labor that makes a world-famous novelist worth writing about was almost certainly done while he was sitting all by himself in a small room. The raw material was probably invisible to everyone but him."

Trillin goes on to note that "a visitor to Herman Melville's study couldn't expect to find any whales."