"The bed has become a place of luxury to me! I would not exchange it for all the thrones in the world."

April 4, 2012 1:01 PM

Literary Style: 15 Writers' Bedrooms: Truman Capote, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Alexander Masters, William S. Burroughs, Slyvia Plath, Henry David Thoreau, Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, Miranda Seymour, Mary Roach, Marcel Proust, Michael Morpurgo, William Faulkner.
posted by Fizz (29 comments total)

I'm glad to see a few rumpled bedrooms in that list. The historical ones somehow seem so unnaturally...tidy.
posted by LN at 1:11 PM on April 4, 2012

Let's see pictures of their bathrooms. That's where their best reading and inspiration happens.
posted by Mercaptan at 1:21 PM on April 4, 2012

Let's see pictures of their bathrooms. That's where their best reading and inspiration happens.

Sounds like a shitty idea to me.
posted by Fizz at 1:23 PM on April 4, 2012

Wow, Faulkner needs a visit from Ty Pennington.
posted by thirteenkiller at 1:25 PM on April 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

Here you go: bathroom at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings historic state park
posted by toodleydoodley at 1:28 PM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Proust's is rustic by today's standards. We are all dandies now.
posted by goethean at 1:33 PM on April 4, 2012

It's funny how I was able to picture most of these more or less accurately just based on reading the authors in question (Mary Roach? Probably something simple but SF-y..Of course Captoe has a big gilt mirror. Victor Hugo probably has some pomp and plump Second Empire thing - yep there it is.)
posted by The Whelk at 1:38 PM on April 4, 2012

Hugo's is about as opulent as his writing; I would feel very comfortable in Woolf's.
posted by smirkette at 1:49 PM on April 4, 2012

Here you go: bathroom at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings historic state park

See, I could write the great American novel if I had a bathtub like that.
posted by Mercaptan at 1:50 PM on April 4, 2012

I find Hemingway's bedroom very relaxing. I wonder what his bathroom looked like...
posted by Valeria Passetti at 2:04 PM on April 4, 2012

I've been in Emily Dickinson's bedroom. It's really quite lovely and cozy and I can understand why she (allegedly) didn't leave it all that often.
posted by sonika at 2:07 PM on April 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

I thought Proust's was oddly crowded, while being in Hugo's must be like sitting in a giant velvet slipper.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:15 PM on April 4, 2012

I used to have a Patti Smith permanently installed in my bedroom but it proved inconvenient in the long term so I called the council and had them take it away.
posted by tigrefacile at 2:22 PM on April 4, 2012 [7 favorites]

Flannery O'Connor's room was the most comforting to me. It felt like "home" to me.
posted by Fizz at 2:23 PM on April 4, 2012

Flannery O'Connor's room was the most comforting to me. It felt like "home" to me.

Hmm let's see brooding and gothic? Oh good.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:41 PM on April 4, 2012

henry miller's bathroom
posted by oomny at 2:44 PM on April 4, 2012

was faulkner's bedroom in a transient hotel? dude was not livin large
posted by facetious at 3:12 PM on April 4, 2012

...And in one transcendent burst I realize that I want to be Victor Hugo when I grow up.
posted by Because at 3:27 PM on April 4, 2012

Knowing Apartment Therapy, I'm more than willing to be that none of the publications nor the photographers gave consent for their work to be published on the site. And none of these photos present the rooms as they were during the authors' lifetimes.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:00 PM on April 4, 2012

Of course Patti Smith just happened to be sitting on Burroughs' bed. I have a great deal of respect for her, but good lord I wish she'd ease up on the hero worship and name-dropping.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:08 PM on April 4, 2012

I'm not a huge Woolf fan, but damn if I don't covet her bedroom.
posted by thivaia at 4:10 PM on April 4, 2012

Nope. Has to be fake. Nothing will ever convince me that Flannery O'Connor's bedroom was not covered with pictures of unquiet dead children being floated down rivers of Bibles. She probably made little models of the caskets and taped in weird advertisements and pictures of owls and corny jokes cut from newspapers' comics section.

God I love Flannery O'Connor.
posted by WidgetAlley at 4:14 PM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

And none of these photos present the rooms as they were during the authors' lifetimes.

The Thoreau photo doesn't even present a room that existed during the author's lifetime. That's the interior of the "reconstructed" cabin at Walden Pond, built more than a century after Thoreau's was torn down.
posted by RogerB at 4:35 PM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Of course Patti Smith just happened to be sitting on Burroughs' bed. I have a great deal of respect for her, but good lord I wish she'd ease up on the hero worship and name-dropping.

On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, I have doubts that one can draw a line connecting any two great artists of the last half-century that doesn't at some point intersect with Patti Smith, so I'm inclined to allow her to continue doing whatever she pleases, because she's pretty much the Center of the Universe.

/fanboy
posted by BitterOldPunk at 5:21 PM on April 4, 2012

Carl Sandburg's bedroom is quite cozy, and like the rest of his house is filled with books.
posted by TedW at 5:47 PM on April 4, 2012

The Thoreau photo doesn't even present a room that existed during the author's lifetime. That's the interior of the "reconstructed" cabin at Walden Pond, built more than a century after Thoreau's was torn down.

... and where he only lived for a little over a year, too. When I first saw this, I hoped that someone had a 19th c. photo of his room of 10+ years at 255 Main St. in Concord. It's the scene of many interesting anecdotes and meditations in his journal^*, and the literary bedroom I'd most like to be able to see.

*A few good ones: Travelers at night / Inspired by waking up to a mud turtle's shell / Wakes up covered in frost / A frozen tortoise revived / John Quincy Adams not a genius / "High in my chamber in the frosty nights"
posted by ryanshepard at 6:12 PM on April 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Of course Patti Smith just happened to be sitting on Burroughs' bed. I have a great deal of respect for her, but good lord I wish she'd ease up on the hero worship and name-dropping.

...the hero worship and name-dropping are kinda essential to her ethos of poetry/rock'n'roll as a modern mythology.
posted by ovvl at 7:04 PM on April 4, 2012

Fuck, there's not even anywhere to charge your Kindle in any of those.

And Hemingway's room looks exactly like the front window display at the nearest Tommy Bahama Home store.
posted by Keith Talent at 8:59 PM on April 4, 2012

I've been in Virginia Woolf's bedroom at Monk's House (pictured here) and it was lovely and bright and airy. I believe most of the furniture is original; much of it is from the Omega workshops. Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell painted the mantelpiece and that neat lamp. I wouldn't mind living there. But the real treat was her writing lodge. That's where she penned all her famous novels.

When I arrived in Rodmell, Monk's House wasn't open for the day yet. I took a walk across the downs and found the Ouse river where Virginia had drowned. It was surreal.
posted by rabbitbookworm at 10:00 PM on April 4, 2012