The 11 best historic authors' homes to visit in the U.S.

You can find places where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in six different states, since a large part of the Ingalls saga—her nine-book series starting with Little House in the Big Woods— involves the family’s moving from place to place. But in Mansfield, Missouri, you can visit Rocky Ridge Farm, where the adult Laura and her husband, Almanzo Wilder, moved in 1896. Inside the home, you’ll find the small wooden desk with pigeon holes where she began writing about her childhood crossing the prairie in a covered wagon. The Little House series grew wildly popular with more than 60 million copies sold, translated into 26 languages and continuously in print since the 1930s.

Starting July 9, a new Little House on the Prairie series launches on Netflix. This version will tackle how things looked for the Osage Nation, whose land was stolen by the pioneers’ westward expansion.

Time Out tip: In September, the Wilder Days Festival includes a parade, performances, an ice cream social, free admission to the Mansfield Area Historical Museum, food vendors, a chance to meet some of the original Little House on the Prairie TV show cast members, and, most excitingly, a chance to hear Pa’s German fiddle played. It’s Laura’s father’s actual instrument, on display at the home and only played once a year. I once bought a CD of Pa’s Fiddle, a recording of the songs Laura includes in the book series, and it came with a signed photo of Dean Butler, who played Almanzo on the original TV show! That stayed on my fridge for a long time.

Address: 3060 Highway A, Mansfield, Missouri 65704

Price: $18 adults, $8 ages 6-17

When to visit: Open March 1 to November 15

The first U.S. poet’s residence designated as a National Historic Site, the Carl Sandburg Home preserves the legacy of a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. His most famous work was a biography of Abraham Lincoln during the war years, but you may also remember from grade school Sandburg's frequently anthologized poem “Fog,” which has it coming in “on little cat feet.” You can visit Connemara, where he spent the last two decades of his life, a 264-acre property of woods and pastures in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The house still has original furnishings, and Sandburg’s study holds thousands of his books.

Time Out tip: Come for a hike; there are 5 miles of trails ranging from beginner to strenuous. Better yet, prepare for adorableness overload at the working dairy goat farm that Sandburg’s wife, Lilian, established. Descendants of those original horned and hoofed cuties still live here, and you can even use a provided brush to groom them.

Address: 81 Carl Sandburg Lane, Flat Rock, NC 28731

Price: Free

When to visit: Open year-round

Poet, short story writer, and novelist Ernest Hemingway is best known for his works The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, among many others. Perhaps we most associate him with Paris, but he and his then-wife (he had four), Pauline Hemingway, took over this 1851 Spanish Colonial home in Key West in 1928. They revived the crumbling historical home and raised two sons while living there. Inside the house today, you’ll see many original furnishings that the couple brought back from Europe, as well as taxidermy from Ernest’s trophy hunting. Plus, you can step inside the studio where he wrote many of his famous works. You’ll marvel at the 60-foot-long in-ground pool dug out of sheer coral (poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Hemingway’s wife, Pauline, that the underwater bulbs made it “wonderful to swim around in a sort of green fire with one’s friends looking like luminous frogs”). Finally, this home has about 60 six-toed cats roaming around, descendants of Snow White, an extra-toed cat that Hemingway was given by a sea captain. A cat app is under development.

Time Out tip: Try to visit during July when Key West hosts Hemingway Days, which includes a Hemingway look-alike contest. If you’re a guy with a big white beard, this is your moment to shine. In some years, there’s an arm-wrestling contest to prove you’re as macho as this taciturn writer was. There are also literary events, a marlin fishing tournament and even a “running of the bulls” with sawhorses on wheels.

Address: 907 Whitehead St, Key West, FL 33040

Price: $19 adults, $7 ages 6-12

When to visit: Open year-round

At Jack London State Historic Park in Sonoma Valley wine country, you can visit an exquisitely painful site: the ruins of author Jack London’s Wolf House. This sprawling Arts & Crafts stone mansion burned down just shy of its completion. Signage at Wolf Hall indicates that Jack “never recovered from the blow,” intimating that it failed to buoy his failing health and possibly resulted in his death a few years later at the age of 40. Within its floor plans were 15,000 square feet of literary coziness: 26 rooms with nine fireplaces, a library, a music alcove, a courtyard with a reflection pool, Jack’s “work den” (like a wolf, right?), and “Jack’s sleeping tower” on the fourth floor. You can visit the ruins by way of a short and very beautiful hike through the woods. Also on the grounds are the graves of Jack and his wife Charmian, the Happy House of Walls Museum, a pig palace, winery ruins, stone barns and a small wood-framed cottage the couple lived in before and after Wolf House burned. Jack London’s fame endures; as recently as 2020, Harrison Ford starred in a movie adaptation of his novel The Call of the Wild, and his short story “To Build a Fire” is an agonizing narrative of a man in the Yukon trying to build a fire so he and his dog don’t freeze to death in the snow. If you’ve ever read it, you’ve never forgotten it.

Time Out tip: This year is Jack London’s 150th birthday and throughout 2026, the park will be offering quarterly lectures, free days, a new online guide to the park and (in collaboration with fitness app Strava) a 150-mile challenge to encourage people to walk the 29 miles of woodland trails across 1,565 acres.

Address: 2400 London Ranch Road, Glen Ellen, CA 95442

Price: $15 vehicle entry fee

When to visit: Open year-round

O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter, was a celebrated short story writer. You’ve doubtless read “The Gift of the Magi,” where a young woman cuts off her knee-length hair to sell it and buy her husband a watch chain, while he ironically sells his beloved watch to buy her a decorative hair comb. Wikipedia says there are about 19 film adaptations of that one story! He also wrote “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in which kidnappers eventually pay to get rid of the annoying child they’ve taken. Henry wrote roughly 400 other works and ran a magazine called The Rolling Stone. This National Register home with decorative bric-a-brac collects artifacts and materials relating to Henry’s time here. If you’re a wallpaper lover like me, check out the original William Morris Arts & Crafts papers here, including the Strawberry Thief design. There's also an O. Henry home in San Antonio about an hour and a half's drive away.

Time Out tip: Fancy yourself a punster? The museum hosts an annual Pun-Off World Championship and has done so for almost 50 years.

Address: 409 E 5th St, Austin, TX 78701

Price: Free

When to visit: Open year-round

Pearl S. Buck won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and was a humanitarian who worked for world peace and charitable aid, a legacy that continues today after her 1973 death. Green Hills Farm, her stone farmhouse in Bucks County, is a national historic landmark sitting on 67 acres with award-winning gardens, Buck’s grave and other structures. In the house where she lived with her second husband, seven adopted children and several foster children, visitors today encounter belongings from their life there, ranging from the typewriter she used to her family’s board games in the closet. Buck’s best-known novel is The Good Earth, which won the Pulitzer Prize and influenced her winning the Nobel Prize a few years later for her descriptions of Chinese peasant life. Buck was the child of two Presbyterian ministers who took her to China when she was just five months old, and she lived there until she returned to the U.S. for college.

Time Out tip: Check out Fonthill Castle and Mercer Museum, just 15 minutes away by car.

Address: 520 Dublin Road, Perkasie, PA 18944

Price: $15 adults, $12 seniors, $7 students

When to visit: Open year-round

Poet, novelist and screenwriter, William Faulkner settled into this 1844 Confederate soldier’s plantation house with his wife Estelle and children, and renamed it Rowan Oak. Best known for his books The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner wrote in the home’s library, and later, in a writing room he built at the rear of the house. In warm weather, he’d write on the patio, and in cold weather, he’d write in the warmth of the kitchen. He won the Nobel prize in 1950 and a few years later won the Pulitzer for his book A Fable, and posthumously won a second Pulitzer for The Reivers. Interestingly, he and Hemingway were literary rivals who insulted each other publicly and privately (Faulkner was also not kind to Steinbeck). The Rowan Oak property contains 29 acres of woods and 4 acres of landscaped grounds. On the grounds are a barn, stable, servants’ quarters, and a former dwelling for enslaved people, which Faulkner converted into a smokehouse.

Time Out tip: Dogs are so welcome here that there’s even an Instagram account that features them, called The Dogs at Rowan Oak. You can give your literary best friend a small bit of fame.

Address: 916 Old Taylor Road, Oxford, MS 38655

Price: $5 (must be paid in cash only) for ages 13 and up

When to visit: Open year-round

Southern author Eudora Welty lived in this charming Tudor-style home for the last 75 years of her life. Everything inside is as it was when she lived here, since before her death, she donated it to the state of Mississippi. You’ll see books everywhere (as a child, she’d read two a day, and as an adult, she risked her life in a house fire to save a collection of Dickens). We know Welty best as a short story writer (she won eight O. Henry prizes, plus a slew of other awards), but she garnered the Pulitzer for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. She was the first living author whose works were published as a full-length anthology by the Library of America. Although Welty was a white woman, she often wrote stories that sympathetically featured Black characters, and reviewer Danny Heitman writes, “Welty’s generous view of African Americans… was a revolutionary position for a white writer in the Jim Crow South.”

Time Out tip: Welty was also a wonderful photographer and, like Dorothea Lange, documented people during the Great Depression. Welty was hired by the Works Progress Administration to do so, and several books of her photography are available.

Address: 1119 Pinehurst St, Jackson, MI 39202

Price: $10 adults, $8 seniors ages 60+, teachers and military, $5 students ages 7 and up. Perhaps superstitiously, when the 13th day of the month falls on a day the house is open, admission is free.

When to visit: Open year-round

Flannery O’Connor wrote some wicked short stories; honestly, “Good Country People” is a shocker, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” winds up in many anthologies. She posthumously won the National Book Award for her compilation, Complete Stories. O’Connor and her mother moved to Andalusia, an 1814 cotton plantation, in 1951 following O’Connor’s diagnosis of lupus. They lived here until her early death in 1964; she was only 39. Andalusia then consisted of 520 acres and was used for dairy and beef farming. Today, it’s owned by Georgia College and State University and is on the National Register. The home is filled with artifacts that interpret O’Connor’s time here and her inspiration for her Southern Gothic tales.

Time Out tip: Can’t get enough of O’Connor? You can also visit the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah.

Address: 2628 N. Columbia St, Milledgeville, GA 31061

Price: $7 adults, $6 seniors ages 60 and up, $2 students ages 6 and up

When to visit: Open year-round

This simple white clapboard cottage in the Bronx was built c.1810–1830. Poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe’s cousin-wife, Virginia, died in the house, so it’s probably the most fitting place to visit this haunted man obsessed with death (and pedophilia. He married Virginia when he was 27 and she was 13. It’s because of him that we have ravens quoting “Nevermore,” tell-tale hearts lub-dubbing sinisterly beneath floorboards, and people getting bricked up alive in their own wine cellars. Poe’s character C. Auguste Dupin is also credited with beginning the mystery genre, inspiring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes; the annual Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America pay homage to that influence. Poe wrote one of his most famous poems, “Annabel Lee,” in this cottage while his cat sat on his shoulder. His study was on the second floor, and the fact that the porch held caged songbirds makes you wonder if their singing inspired “The Raven.”

Time Out tip: There are two other house museums in the U.S. dedicated to this morbid poet (the one in Baltimore is open only by reservation, and the one in Philadelphia is a National Historical Site, but is currently closed for a utilities improvement project). Art lovers will want to see the bronze statue of Edgar Allan Poe in Boston’s Poe Square by sculptor Stefani Rocknak.

Address: 2640 Grand Concourse, The Bronx, NY 10458

Price: $5 adults, $3 seniors and children

When to visit: Open weekends only

This is novelist John Steinbeck’s boyhood home, a 1897 Queen Anne style Victorian, but it’s also a restaurant serving salads, soups, and sandwiches in a Victorian space with plenty of floral carpeting and lace curtains. You can indulge in a Steinbeck brownie pie for dessert, or if you’re a child, opt for the “East of Eden” peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the “Tortilla Flat” quesadilla, or the “Cannery Row” grilled cheese sandwich, all named for Steinbeck works. We’re surprised there’s not a Grape Juice of Wrath drink option. In 1900, the Steinbecks moved here and John was born in the front bedroom. Upstairs, you can see the room where he’d lock himself in to write as a shy teenager. Currently, because it’s summer, guided tours happen every Sunday but otherwise take place on select third Saturdays—the sticking point is the decidedly narrow and litigious-minded staircase, but tours bring visitors upstairs by way of a safer outdoor staircase. The gift shop is adorably named the “Best Cellar” (phonetically, “bestseller”).

Time Out tip: For more on Steinbeck, walk two blocks to visit the Steinbeck Center, which is more of a traditional museum showcasing artifacts related to this author.

Address: 132 Central Ave, Salinas, CA 93901

Price: Upstairs tours are free, and downstairs lunch prices vary. Also watch for afternoon high teas, offered on a rotating basis.

When to visit: Year-round