Legendary American novelist Truman Capote hired a local carpenter to custom design his Hamptons house. “He did it to my directions,” explains Capote. “It’s exactly the way I wanted it. I work at this untended look. It’s intentional. You can see how quiet it is here because you can barely see the top of another house. This is a place to be alone.” Above: In a brightly painted and comfortably arranged setting in the living room, the author wrote at this round wicker table. A pack of loose yellow unruled Sphinx paper, some notebooks, a photograph of Capote and his glasses share the space with an open copy of In Cold Blood. (June 2002)
For his Hartford, Connecticut, house, novelist Mark Twain hired Louis Comfort Tiffany and his firm Associated Artists to redecorate the first-floor interiors. The heavy revival style of the library was on the wane in the 1900s. (April 1999)
“There is no winter here,” Russian short story writer and playwright Anton Chekhov wrote of Yalta, where he spent the last five years of his life. In the Yalta house, where he wrote The Cherry Orchard, his desk faces a brick fireplace. (April 1999)
