Writers' Homes of New England Boxed Notecards

Rocky or hospitable, wild or worn smooth by human use; cathedral forest or rolling pasture; salt marsh, blueberry bog, or sky-colored lake; a grey mill town or dappled sunlight on a wedding-cake Victorian porch—there’s a New England for every state of mind. The region is so free with its gifts of the imagination that it’s small wonder so many of America’s best writers have been New Englanders.

These hand-tinted photographic notecards present the dwellings of a few of those writers—Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—as well as a transplant—Mark Twain. The house associated with Little Women and Alcott’s childhood, called “Hillside” by the writer’s family, was later owned by Hawthorne, who expanded it considerably and named it “The Wayside.” Quotations from the writers are reproduced on the card backs.

Stan Lichens uses pastels, French watercolor pencils, oil crayons, and a computer to tint his black-and-white photographs. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York, with his wife and daughter.