17 St. Louis Literary Cribs That Housed Great Authors

Kate Chopin
Central West End
Born in St. Louis in 1850, Chopin moved to New Orleans with her husband in her 20s but moved back to her hometown upon his death. It was here, in the final decade of the 19th century, that Chopin produced her best-known stories and her novel The Awakening, works considered scandalous for their depictions of women behaving badly by the standards of the day. In 1903 Chopin moved to the 4200 block of McPherson Avenue in the Central West End (shown above). Sadly, the following year she suffered a brain hemorrhage while attending the World’s Fair.

Jane Smiley
Webster Groves

Everyone knows that Smiley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Thousand Acres, hails from Webster Groves. Less appreciated is the extent to which Webster and St. Louis as a whole have influenced her four-decade body of work. She tells the RFT that what made Webster a special place to grow up was that different social classes lived in close proximity to one another. 

“Once I got old enough to walk around, I could see the fancy houses in Webster Park, the middle-class houses around Avery School, and the small, junk houses like the one my mother and I rented on St. John Avenue,” she says. “That got me interested in writing about all different classes — and races, since Avery School was peacefully integrated when I was in second grade.” The St. John Avenue house has since been torn down, but the house that used to belong to Smiley’s grandparents still stands tall not far away on Clark Avenue. (It’s shown above.)

Later, Smiley’s family moved to a house on Wood Acre Road in Ladue, not far from the headquarters of the St. Louis County Library. “I used to walk to the library from the house on Wood Acre, pick a book off the shelf, and then lie down on the floor next to the shelf and read it,” she says. “I don’t know why they let me do that, but they did.”

Among other highlights from Smiley’s childhood include seeing shows at the Muny: Peter, Paul and Mary at Kiel Auditorium; and — most legendarily — the Beatles at Busch Stadium in 1966. She adds that she “probably wouldn’t have written” a number of her books had she not grown up here, including The Greenlanders (which fellow St. Louisan Jonathan Franzen called one of the best novels of all time) and her most recent, Lucky, which is due out in April.

T.S. Eliot
Central West End, Midtown

In real estate terms, T.S. Eliot is most closely associated with the stately three-story brick home at 4446 Westminster Place in the Central West End. However, as outlined in Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, he only lived there for a year and was actually born at 2635 Locust Street, which was closer to downtown. In an unintentionally fitting tribute to a man whose best-known work is The Waste Land, that house is now a parking lot — not even a particularly nice parking lot, at that.

After moving from New Mexico to St. Louis, poet Dana Levin recently had some fun with the wasteland that is Eliot’s childhood home, with one section of a poem titled, “Standing Outside the Parking Lot That Was Your Childhood Home.” “It’s exciting to be living in the city that birthed / T.S. Eliot / even though he was a casual / anti-Semite/ like so many of his class and breed,” she writes. “I stand here DLev, / one of the roughs — aspirated, liberally / educated, / shtetl-fed.”

Richard Ford
University City

T.S. Eliot is also name-checked in one of the all-time blistering depictions of our city, courtesy of Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford. In Ford’s Reunion, the protagonist (who totally, for sure, definitely isn’t Richard Ford) bumps into an acquaintance with whose wife he’s had a liaison in the Mayfair Hotel downtown (which actually, totally was a real-life spot and is today the Magnolia Hotel St. Louis, above).

In that story, Ford writes that St. Louis is a “largely overlookable red brick abstraction that is neither West nor Middle West, neither South nor North; the city lost in the middle, as I think of it. I have always found it interesting that it was the home of T. S. Eliot and, only 85 years before that, the starting point of Western expansion. It is a place, I suppose, the world can’t get away from fast enough.” Ouch.

Ford does know a thing or two about high-tailing it out of St. Louis. After dropping out of Washington University’s law school here in the 1960s, Ford returned to the university’s English department as a visiting writer in residence many years later. The story goes that one of the writing program’s fiction students, a born-again Christian, sent him a note outlining what this student saw as many issues with his work. (The aforementioned philandering among them, perhaps?) That letter came on top of the fact that no students came to Ford’s office hours to seek his counsel, a situation that dismayed him. He packed up and drove off.

Is that story true? We couldn’t swear to its every detail, but it’s certainly true that it is a story.

Tennessee Williams
Central West End, University City

Tennessee Williams left St. Louis when he was a young man and famously disdained the place for the rest of his life, bestowing on it the nickname “St. Pollution.” Not all that clever by world-famous playwright standards, if you ask us. But we’re the magnanimous ones here, throwing a very legit festival in his honor every year. During the pandemic, the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis even mounted his “memory play” The Glass Menagerie on a stage built to include the fire escapes of the Central West End apartment building where Williams once lived. 

He shared that space (as well as another apartment in University City) with an abusive drunk of a father, which may to some extent explain his complicated relationship with the city. Today, the Williams family’s apartment at 4633 Westminster Place (depicted above) is an Airbnb, so you too can sleep under the roof that nourished genius.

And true Williams fans may want to make a second stop in St. Louis while following in the playwright’s footsteps. After dropping out of Mizzou, young Tom Williams took a job at the International Shoe Company downtown, the same firm that employed his hated father. Williams despised the factory job and eventually quit to enroll at Wash U, but his time there directly inspired the struggles of his Glass Menagerie protagonist.

The shoe factory today, of course, is St. Louis’ beloved City Museum — and so the building continues to spur the imagination of young people seeking to find their way. Only without, one hopes, the nervous breakdowns that Williams suffered as a cog in the shoe assembly line.

William Gass
University City
William Gass did the opposite of ol’ Tennessee. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he arrived in St. Louis in the late 1960s for a job at Washington University and hung around in the Lou long enough to become an institution unto himself. In 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established him as a serious voice in American fiction, but it’s Gass’ 1995 tome The Tunnel for which he’ll be forever remembered among that specific set of people who appreciate difficult, dense postmodern literature. If you’re into 652 pages of “endless coils of prose,” this is the book for you.

Gass and his wife Mary moved into their stately University City home in 1970. “It’s been a big part of our lives together,” Mary tells the RFT. “It’s the only house we ever lived in together. It always worked for us.” (Gass passed away in December 2017.) Though Gass had an office at Wash U, he did his writing at the home office, a second-floor study above the porch with windows on three sides overlooking the Limits Walk, which, prior to the construction of the Ackert Walkway, was the primary connector between the Loop and the university campus (shown in the photo above). Gass would often work with the windows open and pick up snippets of conversations coming from passersby. “He was sort of tickled every once in a while hearing a student talk to themselves or whistling or singing or something,” Mary recalls.

The interior of Gass’ house is defined by books and bookshelves. As soon as the couple moved in, Gass set about building bookshelves in the house’s second-floor library, sourcing the wood and doing the construction of the shelves himself. When the Gasses’ twins moved out, their bedrooms were also converted to libraries, one for French literature and the other German.

Contrary to the stereotypes about the sort of people who write the kind of difficult books Gass did, the writer and professor didn’t take himself too seriously, at least if the following anecdote is to be believed: Gass once gave a lecture arguing a novel’s words were in fact true, and it was the readers who were the fictional entities. (It no doubt sounded more persuasive coming from Gass.) Some undergrad smart aleck only in attendance at the lecture for extra credit raised his hand and asked why he should care what some short man who may not be real had to say about reality. Gass was taken aback, but laughed. Then the whole crowd did, too.