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
Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore
Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore was a geographer, photographer, and writer who became the first female Board member of the National Geographic Society. She was a native Washingtonian, raised in her mother’s boarding house, and working as a society journalist. She traveled to Japan many times between 1885 and 1928, sometimes in the company of her brother, George Hawthorne Scidmore, a career diplomat. In 1885, returning to DC from Japan for the first time, she had the idea to plant Japanese cherry trees in DC, a scheme finally picked up by First Lady Helen Taft in 1909. Although the first trees imported had to be destroyed due to an infestation, later efforts proved successful, and now those trees have become a symbol of the city.
Scidmore published one novel, As the Hague Ordains (1907), and several books of travel memoirs and travel guides, including Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago (1885), Jinrikisha Days in Japan (1891), Westward to the Far East (1892), Java, the Garden of the East (1897), China, the Long-Lived Empire (1900) and Winter India (1903).
Just some of our many homes...
Myrna Loy
3522 P St. NW, Washington, DC
Jessie Benton Frémont
1305-1315 30th St. NW
Stanley Kunitz
19 2nd St. NE, Washington DC
Sam Lacy
1910 13th St. NW, Washington DC
Sam Lacy
775 Hobart Place NW
Emily Hawthorn
1516 Q Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA
Emily Hawthorn
1231 W Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA
Joseph Owono
2349 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Floyd Dell
1851 Ingleside Terrace NW
Floyd Dell
6307 Lone Oak Dr.
Hugo Black
212 Quaker Lane N.
David Brinkley
111 E. Melrose St.
Atanas Slavov
9011 Lindale Drive
Zahara Heckscher
1214 Irving St NW, Washington, DC, USA
Paul Jennings
721 Madison Pl. NW, Washington, DC
Paul Jennings
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Mary Church Terrell
326 T St. NW, Washington, DC
Lee Lally
4110 Emery Pl. NW
Luis Muñoz Marín
1914 Connecticut Ave. NW
Anna Julia Cooper
201 T Street NW, Washington DC
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
2009 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Octave S. Stevenson
730 24th St. NW
Erico Verissimo
3609 34th St. NW
Helen Churchill Candee
1621 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Latest from Twitter
A Twitter List by TwitterDevAuthor Birthdays
in March
Emily Lee Sherwood (March 28, 1839)
Emily Hawthorn (March 21, 1845)
Ella Dorsey (March 2, 1855)
John Hays Hammond (March 31, 1855)
Isabel Weld Perkins Anderson (March 3, 1876)
Margaret Fishback (March 10, 1900)
Alba de Céspedes (March 11, 1911)
L. Ron Hubbard (March 13, 1911)
Lucille Fletcher (March 28, 1912)
Francis Coleman Rosenberger (March 22, 1915)
Henry Brandon (March 9, 1916)
Eugene McCarthy (March 29, 1916)
Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917)
Pearl Bailey (March 29, 1918)
Douglass Wallop (March 8, 1920)
Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921)
Shirley Graves Cochrane (March 5, 1925)
Stacy Johnson Tuthill (March 10, 1925)
Rafael Squirru (March 23, 1925)
Sandra Day O’Connor (March 26, 1930)
Judith Farr (March 13, 1936)
Jane Flanders (March 26, 1940)
James Oliver Horton (March 28, 1943)
Askia Muhammad (March 28, 1945)
Mark Wayne Craver (March 3, 1956)
Venus Thrash (March 30, 1959)