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
Jean Kerr
Jean Kerr was the author of novels and plays, and is best remembered for her best-selling autobiographical essays, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957), later made into a film and a television situation comedy. She also wrote several other popular plays, including King of Hearts (1954), and the long-running Mary, Mary (1961).
She was a student of Walter Kerr‘s in the graduate drama program at Catholic University. They married and later moved to New York, where Walter became one of the most influential drama critics at the New York Times. He won a Pulitzer for his drama criticism in 1978.
They collaborated on three musical plays, The Song of Bernadette (1946), Touch and Go (1949), and the multiple Tony Award-winning Goldilocks (1958).
Just some of our many homes...
Betty Parry
4814 Falstone Ave.
Anthony Hecht
4256 Nebraska Ave. NW
Jeane L. Dixon
1312 19th St. NW, Washington DC
Catherine Drinker Bowen
3104 Q St NW, Washington, DC, USA
O.B. Hardison, Jr.
1708 21st St. NW, Washington DC
Eleanor Roosevelt
2131 R Street NW, washington, DC
Eleanor Roosevelt
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Caroline Healey Dall
1526 18th St NW, Washington, DC, USA
Caroline Healey Dall
1305 30th St NW, Washington D.C., DC, USA
Walter H. Mazyck
1229 Park Rd. NW, Washington DC
Jean Jules Jusserand
2460 16th St. NW
David Kresh
601 North Carolina Avenue SE
John F. Kennedy
1400 34th St. NW
John F. Kennedy
1528 31st St. NW
John F. Kennedy
3321 Dent Place NW
John F. Kennedy
2808 P St. NW, Washington, DC
John F. Kennedy
3307 N Street NW, Washington DC
John F. Kennedy
2480 16th St. NW
John F. Kennedy
1147 Chain Bridge Road
John F. Kennedy
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Henry Adams
2017 I Street NW
Wendell Phillips Stafford
1725 Lamont St. NW, washington, DC
Wendell Phillips Stafford
1661 Crescent Pl. NW, Washington, DC
Mabel Loomis Todd
1305-1315 30th St. NW
Christopher Hitchens
2022 Columbia Rd. NW
Ann Darr
4902 Falstone Ave.
Ellis L. Yochelson
12303 Stafford Lane
Dee Brown
1717 R St. NW, Washington DC
James Oliver Horton
2205 Burgee Court, Reston, VA
Emma V. Brown
3044 P St. NW, Washington DC
James Weldon Johnson
1333 R St. NW, Washington DC
Frank Carpenter
1318 Vermont 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)