We tend to imagine that some of our favourite books were written in some secluded and exclusive locations that served as the inspiration for some of literature biggest masterpieces, but in reality most of these locations are more mundane than any reader could have envisaged.
Here are few examples of less than ordinary locations.
J.K. Rowling wrote her first Harry Potter book in a café in Edinburgh called The Elephant House while her daughter, Jessica was asleep. It was on a 4-hour journey from Edinburgh to Manchester that she thought of the idea for the boy wizard and the school of magic. The Elephant House Café has a sign saying the birthplace of Harry Potter. But In January 2007, holed up in room 552 to escape the distractions of home, J.K. Rowling wrote the final words of the entire Harry Potter saga. She marked the moment by signing a marble bust in the room — and the suite is now named in her honour, complete with a brass owl door knocker.
Ian Fleming built this modest villa on Jamaica’s north coast in 1946 and returned every winter to write. Across those visits he produced all fourteen James Bond books — from Casino Royale to Dr. No and From Russia, with Love — at his desk overlooking the sea. Today GoldenEye is a chic boutique resort where you can sleep in Fleming’s own rooms.
Maya Angelou, the American author, best known for her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first non-fiction bestseller by an African American woman. She would rent a hotel room in her hometown for a month and would have everything removed from the room except a bed, a table and the bath. She would bring with her a Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, and the Bible; along with a deck of cards and some crossword puzzles. All the painting and decorations would be taken away and staff were banned from entering in case she had thrown a piece of paper on the floor which she didn’t want it discarded. Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas spent time writing in the infamous Chelsea Hotel, New York.
Hemingway kept room 511 at this rose-pink hotel in Old Havana through the 1930s, and it’s where he worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls. The room is preserved much as he left it — typewriter, bed and all — as a small museum to the writer’s Cuban years.
. Vladimir Nabokov said that he preferred to read and write in the privacy of his car, but author of Lolita spend the last 16 years of his life living permanently in this grand lakeside hotel on Lake Geneva, writing Ada and much of his later work from his sixth-floor rooms. A statue of Nabokov still sits in the grounds, gazing out at the water that kept him there
Built in 1892 to receive passengers stepping off the Orient Express, the Pera Palace is where Agatha Christie is said to have written her most famous mystery. Room 411, which she is believed to have favoured, is now dedicated to her . Christie wrote her plots for her novels in the bath while she ate apples.
Roald Dahl wrote in his hut in the garden at his home in Buckinghamshire. He had a quote from Edgar Degas pinned to the wall of his shed, “Art is a lie to which one gives the accent of truth.” Dahl’s shed was inspired by Dylan Thomas, the welsh poet’s hut when Dahl visited it on holiday. Thomas filled his hut’s walls with pictures of Bryon, Walt Whitman, Louis MacNeice and W.H Auden as well as lists of alliterative words. Bernard Shaw built a writing hut in the garden of his home in Hertfordshire. It was built on a revolving mechanism so that he could follow the sun all day while he wrote. ‘People bother me,’ Shaw confessed, ‘I come here to hide from them.’ He named the hut, London so that his staff wouldn’t be lying when they said that he’d ‘gone to London’.
Virginia Woolf wrote in a hut too but she wrote standing up. This way of writing is thought to have been chosen in an attempt not to be outdone by her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, who always painted standing. Ernest Hemmingway also wrote standing up on a cluttered bookshelf a few feet away from his bed. Truman Capote wrote lying down, “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy.”
Benjamin Franklin started the day writing in a bath for an hour. Walter Scott wrote his epic poem Marmion on horseback, riding in the countryside near Edinburgh.
