Joni Rendon's Blog, page 14

The Algonquin Hotel to become a Marriott

The Algonquin Hotel, famed as the 1920s martini-swilling location of choice for some of the era's great literary figures — Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and "The New Yorker" founder Harold Ross — has entered into a partnership with the Marriott hotel chain.  Fortunately the hotel, which has a reputation for fostering an artistic environment, will retain its historic charm and unique identity.  Opened in 1902, it became an official New York City landmark three years ago. The infamous...

Great Expeditions: New England, Part 3

At a land-locked abode in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts, Herman Melville sailed with Captain Ahab and crew in Moby-Dick. Inspiration for the tale came from the view out his study window: snow-covered Mt. Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, which looked to him like the outline of a white whale. (The picture above shows it in the summer, so a little imagination is required.)

The rambling 18th-century farmhouse, which Melville named Arrowhead for artifacts he found on the property, was home to the writer for 13 years. A tour of the house was a fascinating, well-spent hour, with our guide talking about Melville's adventurous past on the high seas, his friendship with fellow writer and Berkshires resident Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the circumstances that led him to all but give up his writing and take a desk job at the customs house in New York City for the last two decades of his life.

Two interesting architectural details immortalize Melville's connection to Arrowhead: a now-restored porch—with a vista of Mt. Greylock—he had built and features in the short story "The Piazza Tales," and lines from "The Chimney" inscribed above the fireplace in the dining room. Melville's brother, who succeeded him at the farm, was so taken with the tale he had the still-visible text etched there for posterity.

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In the neighboring town of Lenox is Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and named for Nathanial Hawthorne's Tangelwood Tales for Girls and Boys. On a rainy Friday evening, before attending a performance at the venue, my husband, Brian, and I traipsed around the muddy grounds looking for "the little red house." It's a replica of a cottage once lived in by Hawthorne and his family (the original was destroyed by fire) and where he wrote The House of the Seven Gables. I had all but given up hope that we were going to find it when Brian spotted it off in the distance.

The Berkshires is literary travel heaven. Lenox was once home to Edith Wharton, whose European-inspired estate, The Mount, I visited on a previous trip to the area.

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While traveling US-7 from the Berkshires to southern Vermont, a sign on the left hand side of the road in Shaftsbury caught my eye. "Robert Frost Stone House Museum." I hadn't yet researched what literary sites might be near the next stop on the RV adventures (as in, consulted Novel Destinations), and I was excited to get a glimpse of the picturesque cottage as I sped by. I went back a couple of days later to have a look around the 250-year-old granite and timber farmhouse, where Frost lived for a decade.

The exhibits are shown in two rooms, including the one where Frost penned the poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"…during the summer. Although the museum section of the house is small, the exhibits are jam-packed with fascinating details—such as how Frost and a group of family and friends were among the first to hike a newly opened section of the Appalachian Trail in the Northeast (his ill-fitting new shoes led him to cut the trip short, taking a train from Connecticut back to Vermont) and the ongoing efforts to restore the apple orchards he once cultivated on the property. On display is a complete set of works by Sir Walter Scott, which the poet gave to his grandson as a Christmas gift.

Frost is buried in Bennington, Vermont, in the cemetery behind the Old First Congregational Church, where he attended services. His final resting place is engraved with what has to be one of the wittiest epitaphs ever to appear on a gravestone: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

Great Expeditions: New England, Part 2

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had quite the life, at least judging by the Cambridge, Massachusetts, home where he lived for 40 years in the 1800s. Marble busts, chandeliers, and oil paintings in gilded frames adorn the house, along with 10,000 books that belonged to the poet.

Among the illustrious visitors to cross the threshold were Charles Dickens, invited for breakfast during his first tour of America, and playwright Oscar Wilde, who said of his host, "Longfellow was himself a beautiful...

Great Expeditions: New England

Meandering through New England on the first leg of the RV adventure has been a literary travel extravaganza.

Things got off to a rocky start at the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. I misread the opening times and arrived to find the childhood home of Eugene O'Neill locked up tight. I peeked in a few windows, though. The gingerbread-trimmed house—which is named for O'Neill's father, a touring stage actor in The Count of Monte Cristo—overlooks the Thames River and is situated in ...

New Orleans' Literary French Quarter

On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the Los Angeles Times travel section takes readers through the literary history of the city's famed French Quarter. "This really was the place to be in the '20s if you couldn't go to Paris,"  said Joanne Sealy, who runs Faulkner House Books (at left) in the residence where the writer once lived and penned his first novel, Soldier's Pay. Journalist Jay Jones offers insight on Faulkner's time in the city, along with playwright Tennessee Williams — ...

Novelist Vendela Vida on the Turkish Coast

Vendela Vida sought solace on the coast of Turkey to finish a novel set in the Arctic Circle. Two years later she returned to the two disparate seaside towns that had captured her imagination — finding them different than she had remembered — and they became the setting for her new novel, The Lovers.

Vida's lyrical and atmospheric piece on her Turkish sojourns, "The Pull of an Idyll as Years Pass By," is the first in a new column in the New York Times travel section: Imprint, in which authors ...

Dublin's Literary Lights

Dublin was recently named the fourth city of literature by UNESCO, joining Melbourne, Iowa City, and Edinburgh. Here are five bookish things to do in the Irish capital.

Experience some traditional Irish craic (good times) on the Jameson Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. Led by two actors who perform famed passages from Irish literature, bibliophiles follow in the footsteps of Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, and a host of contemporary Irish writers to centuries-old haunts where these men of letters once...

The bookcase you'll want to live in

In the Guardian, Lucy Mangan called it "the bookcase you'll want to live in." The Ark is a "free-standing, multi-storey wooden tower comprising a spiral staircase and walls composed of open shelves lined with 6,000 books. The brainchild of Scandinavian architects, Rintala Eggertsson, the Ark was conceived for the special 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition, currently running at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Working on the theme of refuge and retreat, the V&A Museum approached ...

Found at last: Tombstone of Dickens' first cartoonist

The long-lost tombstone of a cartoonist who killed himself after a young Charles Dickens ousted him from The Pickwick Papers project has been found.

Robert Seymour was one of the most prominent illustrators of the early 19th century but ended up an unfortunate footnote in Dickens's career.

His name is set to be restored to prominence when the Charles Dickens Museum  unveils a commemorative plaque and puts his tombstone on display next week.

The stone was discovered by Stephen Jarvis, who is...

Steinbeck's World Travels Focus of Festival

When John Steinbeck departed Stanford University for the final time in 1925, he left his roommate a note: "Gone to China. See you again sometime." His plan was to make like adventure writer Jack London and sail to the Far East on a freighter, but that voyage didn't pan out. He had plenty of other adventures throughout this life, though, like serving as a newspaper correspondent in northern Africa during World War II, following in King Arthur's footsteps through Somerset, England, and...