This project documents the homes of literary authors who once lived in the greater Washington, DC region. We wanted to honor the widest range of literary authors possible, including authors of different backgrounds, writing styles, and influences. We include novelists, poets, playwrights, and memoirists. We do not include writers who were solely journalists, and, with few exceptions, authors of genre literature. We have tried hard to include authors from a range of time periods, from the city’s founding in 1800 through the present.
Recent Additions
What’s New?
We got a great review in the Washington City Paper in August 2020, calling our project “an online database of more than 300 writers and their D.C. homes [that] offers a glittering who’s who of Washington literary history.”
Our official relaunch celebration took place on November 29, 2018. After a decade of implementing this project independently, co-editors Kim Roberts and Dan Vera were pleased to celebrate the project’s new permanent home. Sponsored by HumanitiesDC, this updated version of the website features a responsive design easily navigable by desktop or smartphone users. They have promised to continue and preserve our research on writers’ homes in perpetuity.
HumanitiesDC is one of 56 state humanities councils and the capital’s local affiliate for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
With our latest additions, we are now documenting the homes of 405 writers who lived and wrote in the greater Washington, DC region!
Featured Author
Toni Morrison
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, an American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the PEN/Saul bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Morrison is one of the most significant and groundbreaking of all contemporary American authors.
Born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison moved to DC to attend Howard University, graduating in 1953. She than earned an MA at Cornell University (1955) and taught at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years. She returned to the city to teach at Howard in the English Department for seven years, living at these two addresses on the same street, and it was here where she married and had two children before divorcing in 1964. During that time, she was an active member in the salon in the home of May Miller and wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970).
After the breakup of her marriage, Morrison worked as an editor in New York at Random House from 1965 to 1983, where she worked with such writers as Chinua Achebe, Muhammad Ali, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Athol Fugard, Gayl Jones, Huey Newton, and Wole Soyinka. She was the first senior editor of African descent in Random House’s fiction department, playing a vital role in the elevation of Black voices to American readers. From 1989 to 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair of Humanities at Princeton University, and the university named a building in her honor in 2017. She was also on the editorial advisory board of The Nation.
Morrison is the author of eleven novels, including Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), A Mercy (2008), and God Help the Child(2015). She also published children’s literature, plays, an opera libretto, and several collections of nonfiction. Morrison appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1998, and a quote of hers is inscribed in marble at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Her novel Beloved was adapted into a movie in 1998, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. She is the subject of three documentary films. The Toni Morrison Society is based in Georgia, under the auspices of the American Literature Association; in addition to scholarly conferences, the society sponsors book prizes, teaching initiatives, and a Young Readers Circle.
In her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, Morrison stated: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge… It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.”
Just some of our many homes...
Alba de Céspedes
1529 18th St. NW
Ella Dorsey
2121 California St. NW
Helen Hayes
1909 8th St NW
Helen Hayes
1418 W St NW,, Washington DC
Helen Hayes
1436 W St., NW, Washington DC
Natalie Clifford Barney
2306 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Jacklyn Potter
1411 Kennedy St. NW
Annulet Andrews
2400 16th St. NW
George Watterston
224 Second St. SE, Washington, DC
Paul Jennings
721 Madison Pl. NW, Washington, DC
Paul Jennings
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Henri Bonnet
2221 Kalorama Road, NW
Jeanie Gould Lincoln
2108 R St NW, Washington DC
Jeanie Gould Lincoln
1620 19th St. NW, Washington, DC
Jeanie Gould Lincoln
2235 Q St NW, Washington DC
Jeanie Gould Lincoln
1717 20th St NW, Washington DC
Ben Bradlee
3014 N St. NW, Washington DC
Jim Everhard
1614 17th St. NW
Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren
Commandant's Headquarters, Navy Yard, Washington DC
Alain Locke
1326 R St. NW, Washington, DC
Alain Locke
1309 R St. NW, Washington DC
Douglass Wallop
3435 8th St S, Arlington VA
Robert Ruark
2700 Wisconsin Ave NW
Robert Ruark
2022 16th St. NW
Robert Ruark
1447 Q St. NW, Washington, DC
J. Goldsborough Bruff
1009 24th St. NW
James Thurber
2034 I Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA
Latest from Twitter
A Twitter List by TwitterDevAuthor Birthdays
in June
Josiah Henson (June 15, 1789)
Horatio King (June 21, 1811)
Caroline Healey Dall (June 22, 1822)
Ambrose Bierce (June 24, 1842)
Rose Elizabeth Cleveland (June 13, 1846)
Helen Herron Taft (June 2, 1861)
James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871)
Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872)
William Richards Castle, Jr. (June 19, 1878)
Robert Rice Reynolds (June 18, 1884)
Floyd Dell (June 28, 1887)
Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896)
Marita Bonner (June 16, 1899)
Brainard Cheney (June 3, 1900)
Katherine Graham (June 16, 1917)
M. Carl Holman (June 27, 1919)
Gabrielle Edgcomb (June 23, 1920)
Edwin Zimmerman (June 11, 1924)
Elaine Magarrell (June 2, 1928)
Elisavietta Ritchie (June 29, 1932)
Maxine Combs (June 1937)
Henry Taylor (June 21, 1942)
Larry McMurtry (June 3, 1946)
Bruce Duffy (June 9, 1951)