Stockhom Literary Tourism

I have to admit to having been swept up in the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl who Played with Fire; The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest). They have risen high on the list of my post-dissertation summer of mysteries, thrillers, and other delicious fiction I haven’t let myself read in, well, years. I really like these books. I like how the female characters respond to violence, the male feminist character, the rollicking plot, the oddly translated and workman-styled prose, and I like the setting.

And apparently, I’m not the only one who sees Stockholm as a new and delightful literary landscape. A recent New York Times piece warns that tourists obsessed with setting of these novels are planning trips, and scoping out Stockholm.

I wonder if this kind of intense literary tourism is a uniquely American phenomenon. It was American tourists obsessed with Dan Brown novels that descended upon the European settings of his Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. And while I know a good number of folks from all over the world visit Mark Twain sites (including Borges, who insisted on wading into the Mississippi River to get closer to Twain). I think the en mass flood of intense literary interest in a place may be largely an American Phenomenon. Tell me I’m wrong. Remind me that there are a great number of Japanese tourists who turn up at Prince Edward Island each year in search of Anne of Green Gables. Who else does this?

What other novels have, in the last 25 years, set off tourist movements?

How Buildings Survive

The home that Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas was torn down long ago. It happens all the time. Old houses are razed to make way for new.

I’m interested in how it is that buildings survive. What we can learn from the ones that do? What can we learn from the ones that are lost? Some are saved in my new home city, Philadelphia,

because of their association with a famous person or because they are considered old enough and “historic” enough to be

important. Others, despite their associations and age, are wiped out.

I started this project, researching historic houses in the U.S., while I was living in Lawrence, Kansas, and love and family have inspired my move far from my Oklahoma roots to Philadelphia. Here it is, frankly, quite a bit easier to explore old buildings. Not necessarily just because this is a city where so many historic buildings have managed to survive, but because in this part of the country there is an expectation that it might matter whether or not they do survive. And should they survive, or should they be resurrected (as in the case of the National Park Service’s President’s House Site), it matters a great deal the kinds of stories that are told with them.

I’m most interested, currently, in the intersections of literature and places, real places and imagined ones. What makes folks visit historic places, and what makes people interested in visiting the homes of authors that they admire? What makes folks spend time walking around the small town, Red Cloud, Nebraska in search of Willa Cather or fly halfway around the world to Prince Edward Island to visit an imagined Green Gables? What makes readers invest in a Paris walking tour in search of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? And what forces contribute to the fact that I can visit the Edgar Allan Poe House, where Poe wrote “The Black Cat” but I can’t visit the house that Hughes describes in his autobiographical novel, Not without Laughter?

Here I keep track of my visits to historic sites, research, and adventures in Philadelphia.