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

Josiah Henson

Josiah Henson was a minister and abolitionist who wrote an autobiography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, As Narrated by Himself (1849), which inspired the character of George Harris in Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s influential novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Henson wrote two more memoirs, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life (1858), and Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life: An Autobiography of Josiah Henson (1876).

Henson was born enslaved on a farm near Port Tobacco in Charles County, Maryland. He moved to this address when he was made supervisor of the Isaac Riley Farm. He subsequently moved to Lewisport, Kentucky in 1825 to take a position as a slave overseer, and escaped from slavery in Kentucky in 1830. In Canada, he settled into an all-Black town in Ontario, the Dawn Settlement, where he farmed and was a Methodist minister. He was the first person of African descent to be featured on a Canadian stamp.

Although slave quarters have not survived at the park named for Henson, the owner’s house remains, with a frame portion dating to 1800 and a log wing built as a kitchen and sleeping loft that dates to 1850. Montgomery Parks opened a museum in 2021 dedicated to telling the story of Henson’s life and the history of enslavement in Maryland.

(Read more)

Just some of our many homes...

James Reston

3124 Woodley Rd. NW, Washington DC

James Reston

1637 34th St NW, Washington, DC, USA

Louis J. Halle

1423 Shepherd St. NW

Joseph Owono

2349 Massachusetts Ave, NW

Margaret Truman

4701 Connecticut Ave NW

Margaret Truman

1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Siv Cedering Fox

11008 Picasso Lane, Potomac MD

Elizabeth Bishop

1312 30th Street NW

David Kresh

601 North Carolina Avenue SE

Lilian May Miller

1458 Columbia Rd. NW

R.W. Apple

1509 28th St. NW, Washington DC

Don Marquis

1224 13th St. NW

Stephen Spender

323 Second Street SE, Washington DC

Carlos Peña Rómulo

2253 R Street, NW, washington, DC

Carlos Peña Rómulo

3422 Garfield St NW

Maria Martins

3000 Massachusetts Ave. NW

Erico Verissimo

3609 34th St. NW

John L. McCreery

230 11th Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

Luis Muñoz Marín

1914 Connecticut Ave. NW

Art Buchwald

2650 Virginia Ave. NW

Art Buchwald

4327 Hawthorne Place Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

Katherine Garrison Chapin

1669 31st St. NW

Reed Whittemore

4526 Albion Rd.

Reed Whittemore

1518 28th St. NW

Victor R. Daly

1614 T Street NW, Washington, DC

Victor R. Daly

1612 Manchester Lane NW

Rudolph Fisher

1607 S St. NW, Washington DC

Rudolph Fisher

245 Florida Ave NW

William W. Warner

2243 47th St. NW

J. Goldsborough Bruff

1009 24th St. NW

Selden Rodman

1207 35th St NW, Washington, DC

Hervé Alphand

2221 Kalorama Road, NW

Latest from Twitter

Author Birthdays
in February

Emma Willard (February 23, 1787)
Henry Lytton Bulwer (February 13, 1801)
Harriet Ann Jacobs (February 11, 1813)
Frederick Douglass (February 1818)
Ellen Tarr O’Connor Calder (February 21, 1830)
Margaret Louisa Sullivan Burke (February 1836)
Henry Adams (February 16, 1838)
Jean Jules Jusserand (February 18, 1855)
Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice (February 27, 1859)
Philander Chase Johnson (February 6, 1866)
Zitkala-Sa (February 22, 1876)
Millicent Todd Bingham (February 5, 1880)
Alice Roosevelt Longworth (February 13, 1884)
Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885)
Mariano Brull (February 24, 1891)
Lillian Rogers Parks (February 1, 1897)
Luis Muñoz Marín (February 18, 1898)
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902)
Una Marson (February 6, 1905)
St. Clair McKelway (February 13, 1905)
Dee Brown (February 28, 1908)
Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909)
Stephen Spender (February 28, 1909)
Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911)
Herman Taube (February 2, 1918)
Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920)
Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921)
Margaret Truman (February 17, 1924)
Roger Mudd (February 9, 1928)
Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931)
Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy (February 22, 1932)
Roland Flint (February 27, 1934)
Martin Galvin (February 21, 1937)
Siv Cedering Fox (February 5, 1939)
Donald Britton (February 16, 1951)