Columbia Heights “America’s Most Literary Street”

By on August 24, 2011 11:13 pm in Arts and Entertainment, Brooklyn History, Literature

According to Evan Hughes, in the Daily Beast’s “Book Beast”:

Columbia Heights, a short street in Brooklyn, just might be the most literary street in America. Columbia Heights is the closest street to the water in the quiet, leafy Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, and the authors who have lived there, if they were lucky, enjoyed commanding views of Manhattan’s skyline across the East River.

We know Norman Mailer lived there for many years, and Thomas Wolfe (who also lived for a while on Montague Terrace) for a short time. The famous “February House”, home for a time to W.H. Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers, and renowned novelist Gypsy Rose Lee, was just a few doors off Columbia Heights on Middagh Street. Can you name any others?

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  • San

    And Oliver Jeffers, childrens picture book author/illustrator.

  • AnnOfOrange

    Norris Church

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com Claude Scales

    Of course.

  • nabeguy

    Hart Crane

  • http://www.troyduanesmith.com Troy D. Smith

    While living on Columbia Heights in 1989, I wrote the first chapter of what would eventually be the historical novel BOUND FOR THE PROMISE-LAND, which won Western Writers of America’s Spur Award for best original paperback novel of 2001 (and was declared a modern classic in WWA’s official journal, Roundup.)

  • Carol

    John Dos Passos

  • irma

    arthur miller on willow, truman capote on willow.

  • Gerry

    And Author T. H. Mulligan wrote:

    A Guide to the Mid-Hudson Valley, and this was a great book!

    Mulligan lives on Montague Terrace and in Cold Spring, NY.

  • Klipspringer

    Gypsy Rose Lee…a novelist?….really?!

  • http://loscalzo.posterous.com Homer Fink

    Yes, Ms. Lee was a novelist – come on the Hidden Brooklyn Heights Walking Tour 9/3 and find out more!
    http://hiddenbrooklynheights.com