Hilary Iris Lowe

• Managing Director at Temple University

Literary tourism has existed in the United States since at least the early nineteenth century, and now includes sites in almost every corner of the country. From Page to Place examines how Americans have taken up this form of tourism, offering an investigation of the places and practices of literary tourism from literary scholars, historians, tour...

Challenges to historic house museums are often mired in the rhetoric of crisis. Toward countering that rhetoric, this essay attempts to draw attention to it and to the complicated history of narrative (and storytelling) in interpretation and the academy. It argues that literary house museums are sites of innovation within the house museum sector wi...

Hilary Iris Lowe begins this volume with an examination of literary tourism in her essay on the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. Lowe argues that until recently, the town’s history has taken a backseat to the “historic sites” related to the literary characters that were part of Twain’s fiction. The story of Tom Sawyer, Beck...

Mark Twain has been commemorated for more than eighty-five years at his various houses. His birthplace in Florida, Missouri, his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, his adult home in Hartford, Connecticut, and his summer retreat at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York have all come to celebrate very different versions of the most iconic of American writ...