My travel has often been organized around literary themes or ideas. Most of my time in New York City over the decades has been as a result of book industry meetings, overlaid with my attempts to catch the vibe of an earlier era: wandering through the aisles of The Strand, hoisting a drink in the bar at The Algonquin, or worrying about the ducks in Central Park. Visits to New Orleans find me reading Walker Percy in a hotel garden with a mint julep in hand, or peering up at commemorative plaques about Tennessee Williams. Writers’ conferences and speeches have taken me to other similarly themed spots: from standing at Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, Idaho, or having drinks on the lawn at his boyhood home in Oak Park, Illinois, to using my school girl French to try to rent the hotel room in Paris in which Oscar Wilde died. There is a special sort of connection that we as readers or fans feel in these places, a way to get inside the heart or the head of those we admire. With Mitford Maugham, I plan to curate similar experiences for devotees of the written word. Writers’ lives intrigue us, even on the most mundane level. Where did Joan Didion get an ice cream cone as a young girl, and did sitting on the banks of the Sacramento River create the images that later emerged in her writing? What did Eugene O’Neill see as he looked out the window above his writing desk in his last years, composing the plays that became The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten?
