Writers' Homes of the Hudson River Valley Boxed Notecards

The peaceful, charming Hudson River Valley has been home and inspiration to some of America’s most prominent writers. This collection of notecards features Stan Lichens’s inviting photographs of four of the region’s literary havens.

Sunnyside, at Tarrytown, New York, is the home to which Washington Irving retired to write his first book, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. For this book Irving used the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker, creating a quaint, humorous character that has become a familiar New York byword.

Novelist and short-story writer Edith Wharton spent time in the home of her aunt in Rhinecliff, New York. She was the first woman recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1921). Novelist Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel) spent five years in nearby Rhinebeck. When he died after a brief illness, he left his editor with an eight-foot stack of manuscript that became two novels and a collection of short stories. Also included here is a picture of Herman Melville’s family home at Lansingburgh, New York. Melville completed his masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, in 1851, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that his work was recognized for its genius.

Love for architecture and commitment to the preservation of historic sites, particularly that of the beauty of the Hudson River Valley, have inspired many of Stan Lichens’s creative photographic projects. Lichens uses pastels, French watercolor pencils, and oil crayons to tint his black-and-white photographs, then digitally manipulates them to achieve a subtly luminous effect. Brief quotations are included on card backs.