In my many pilgrimages to writers’ homes, I’ve felt two responses, often simultaneously. There’s excitement about my proximity to creation. About the whiff of genius that lingers—like lavender, like music—beyond a study’s velvet rope. But then I feel comforted, too. That my literary heroes were, in the sunny patois of supermarket tabloids, “just like us.” Folks who fretted over floorboards and flashing. Who had toilets, toasters, and trash.

Robert Frost’s Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vermont is just that—a stone house—but it’s also where he wrote “The Road Not Taken.” That poem’s lines fill the rooms like winter light. Emily Dickinson’s Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, stunned me into a reverential silence until I saw it for its component parts: beds and windows, beams and bricks.

Another way to think about all this is personification. A writer’s home personifies its owner, giving visitors the sense of “knowing” a person (usually dead) who held the pen. It personifies their writing too. Here’s their typewriter, here’s their table, here’s something tactile on which to ground an artform that can, at its best, hang words in air.

This holds true for writers we admire and those we don’t. When I spiral up the stone steps of Hawk Tower, the poet Robinson Jeffers’ oceanside eyrie in Carmel, California, I feel like I am Jeffers, or at least his houseguest. No such joy accompanied my daily walks around the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana. I rack this up to the badness of Ben-Hur. My dog shared my disdain, peeing frequently on old Lew’s trees.

Lately, when I pass a sign for a writer’s home or peek into J.D. McClatchy’s coffee table book, American Writers at Home, I feel something sour. Like the foxing of a frontispiece. Like crawl space mold. At first, I thought it simple envy. We writers are envious creatures. We envy each other’s sentences. We envy each other’s successes. We even envy our predecessors’ sentences and successes, which surround us in their homes.

This stirring, though, was different, and newer, dating back to 2022, when my wife and I sold our home of six years in Crawfordsville, just across the street from Lew Wallace. It deepened in the year we spent in Portland, Oregon—lucky beneficiaries of my sabbatical—and even after we returned to a new Hoosier zip code. By then the very idea of a writer’s home, a domicile where an author sets up permanent shop, struck me as antiquated. Even privileged. What changed?

Well, we did. From 2022 to 2024, we bounced among three houses, returning to what was, for the majority of our marriage, native ground: the rental market. My perspective on housing shifted. Renting was flexible and maintenance-free. Ownership was permanent and bougie. Mortgage rates rose while the number of active listings plummeted. Prices ballooned, inflation flattened (or shrank) buying power. It felt like a bad time to buy a home.

And yet last fall my wife and I started haunting Zillow and pouncing on early showings. We chatted up our elderly neighbor’s sons—I’m not proud of this—when that neighbor died. (They were selling, but for more than we had.) Throughout it all, I thought about the writers’ homes I’d visited, and if those writers’ lives bore any resemblance to my own. Did I secretly hope, in buying a home, to mimic their lifestyle? Was that possible in 2024?

Not if I wanted to emulate Mark Twain, whose Hartford mansion boasts a billiard parlor and a fireplace with a fluted flue. Ditto Edna St. Vincent Millay, who’d ask the swimmers in her outdoor pool to splash about nude. Even the more modest homes, like Walt Whitman’s row house in Camden, New Jersey, reek of entitlement and stability. Photographs show the elderly poet’s floors there bestrewn with papers—like a hoarder clinging to a golden past.

Of course, this is all unfair—to these writers and to me. The economics of literature has shifted. Its cultural capital too. (Besides, it’s masochistic to compete with someone whose home address is a historic landmark.) As the internet makes writing more democratic, writers’ homes feel elite or off-limits. Don’t touch anything! isn’t just a warning about rarified artifacts; it’s a reminder that this is all out of reach. Today, writers’ homes represent twin goals that remain, for most working writers, distant or divorced: financial security and geographic certainty.

I’ve met few writers who publish their way to a down payment, and if the AI innovators have their way, I’ll meet fewer still. Most writers I know are peripatetic, moving toward the promise of a paycheck, which they often teach to secure. A “room of one’s own” was Virginia Woolf’s metaphor for the solitude needed by (and denied to) women writers. But as the local Starbucks and public library, the soccer sideline and the playground can attest, solitude is a luxury that many writers can’t afford. What plaque will hang over these sites of hurried composition? Who’ll tour them, 50 years hence, to pay homage to the novels being written there right now?

If I’m still alive then, two things will be true: my poetry still won’t make money, and my mortgage will be paid off. That’s right, Dear Reader, we did buy a home, though not—at least in my case—because pride of ownership or wealth building held much allure. Nor did the promise of a home office, its shelves sagging with books. No, I bought a house to retain a feeling, however misguided or intangible, that I have some control over my own life. That my loves were perpetually protected. That we’re safe inside our weatherproof ark.

The history of writers’ homes reminds me that this is a delusion, and one we sign for on the dotted line. Ernest Hemingway lost his Havana residence, Finca Vigía, to the Cuban Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson watched his Concord home burn; he was so beset by despair or dementia that he tossed a few belongings back into the flames. The poet Anne Bradstreet, who wrote “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House (July 10th, 1666),” suffered much the same:

Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best.
My pleasant things in ashes lie,
And them behold no more shall I.

It doesn’t take a coup or conflagration to remind us that our lives are fragile and that our “pleasant things” are bound, like our bodies, for ash. We can install smoke detectors, map the flood plains, and test for radon. (God knows, I’ve done all three.) But catastrophe will inevitably find—if not our actual houses—then everything they represent: family, contentment, a quiet place in the world.

Owning a home helps us to forget that fact, however briefly, as we arrange new furniture and mow the lawn. I’d almost forgotten it myself, tucked away in my new basement study, until I looked out my only window to see the bees, right at eye level, pollinating the front yard. Then I remembered the siding needs painting. Then I remembered that I’m already halfway underground.