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 383 writers who lived and wrote in the greater Washington, DC region!
Featured Author
Anthony Hecht
Anthony Hecht was the author of ten books of poems, and winner of the Prix de Rome (1951), Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1968), Bollingen Prize (1983), Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1988), and Frost Medal (2000). He was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1982-84. He was posthumously awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2004.
Hecht’s books of poems include A Summoning of Stones (1954), The Hard Hours (1967), The Venetian Vespers (1979), The Darkness and the Light (2001), and the posthumous Collected Later Poems (2005). He translated Aeschylus, and also published four books of criticism,including a study of W.H. Auden.
Hecht was drafted into the army in 1944, serving in Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, and helping to liberate Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, an experience that led to post traumatic stress disorder, a breakdown, and hospitalization in 1959.
A master of traditional verse forms, he is credited as one of the inventors of the double dactyl, a form of light verse. Hecht taught at a number of colleges, including the University of Rochester, Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown University.
Just some of our many homes...
Margaret Louisa Sullivan Burke
1602 15th St NW, Washington, DC, USA
Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice
1525 H St NW, Washington, DC, United States
Katherine Garrison Chapin
1669 31st St. NW
Katherine Graham
2920 R St. NW, Washington DC
Katherine Graham
1624 Crescent Place, NW, Washington DC
Anthony Hecht
4256 Nebraska Ave. NW
John Claggett Proctor
1605 Jonquil Street NW
John Claggett Proctor
1233 Madison Street NW
Joaquin Miller
Rock Creek Park, Beach Drive at Military Rd, Washington DC
Lee Lally
4110 Emery Pl. NW
Douglass Wallop
3435 8th St S, Arlington VA
Sigmund Skard
3704 33rd Place NW
Israel Lewis
2445 Lyttonsville Road
Blanca Varela
1928 35th Pl. NW
Mildred Cram
1227 S St. NW, Washington DC
Eugene McCarthy
7902 Custer Rd.
Charles Warren Stoddard
300 N St. NW, Washington, DC
Roy J. Carew
818 Quintana Place NW
Emily Hawthorn
1516 Q Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA
Emily Hawthorn
1231 W Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
2009 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Wendell Phillips Stafford
1725 Lamont St. NW, washington, DC
Wendell Phillips Stafford
1661 Crescent Pl. NW, Washington, DC
Esther Popel Shaw
111 Columbia Rd NW, Washington, DC, USA
Robert Lowell
721 Madison Place NW, Washington, DC
LaSalle Corbell Pickett
2853 Ontario Rd. NW
Floyd Dell
1851 Ingleside Terrace NW
Floyd Dell
6307 Lone Oak Dr.
John Phillips
3 East Oxford Ave.
John Phillips
917 Potomac Ave., Alexandria, VA
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)
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)