Inventive History: Anne Trubek, 'A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses,' at Politics and Prose

When Anne Trubek visited Mark Twain’s boyhood residence in Hannibal, Mo., she was perplexed to encounter a historical marker declaring that Tom Sawyer painted the fence outside. Across the street stands the equally puzzling “home of Becky Thatcher.”

What’s amiss in this charming tableau? Sawyer and Thatcher aren’t real. Such Disney-esque pandering to tourists in Hannibal — and other instances of what Trubek calls “lit porn” — inspired her new book, “A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses,” a sometimes-funny, always-insightful look at the value of visiting authors’ abodes.

The practice of fetishizing artists’ dwellings seems most prevalent in the literary world, versus those of music or film. “The product of a writer tends to be individual and solitary, so people feel a longing to have a physical place to go,” Trubek says.

Trubek worked on “A Skeptic’s Guide” intermittently for two decades, sitting down to write once she secured a tenured position as a professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College. She visited more than 20 houses, among them two of four preserved Ernest Hemingway homes (in Key West, Fla., and Ketchum, Idaho).

In this part of the country, she stopped by Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore home, finding it notable for “the poverty of the Poe family when they lived here, and the poverty of the neighborhood today.” (D.C. itself is sorely lacking in writers’ museums, with just the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Anacostia.)

Despite Trubek’s initial doubts, a few sites left her genuinely moved — the ruins of Jack London’s beloved California home, and an empty lot in Cleveland, Ohio, where African-American writer Charles Chesnutt’s house once stood.

“At the beginning, I was skeptical about writers’ houses and believed in the academic study of literature. In the end, I was skeptical of academia and believed in the experiences that these places afford people,” Trubek says.

Still, she thinks there are more meaningful ways to honor writers than with tourist attractions. “We could create fellowships and schools in their names, or distribute free books to teachers,” she says. “We’d be creating new writers, and new readers and experiences.”

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Written by Express contributor Amy Cavanaugh
Photo courtesy University of Pennsylvania Press