Reading in three dimensions: Architectural biography from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Edith Wharton (Henry James, William Dean Howells)

"Reading in Three Dimensions: Architectural Biography from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Edith Wharton" is a multidisciplinary work that combines literary studies with biography, architecture, and material culture studies. The dissertation examines the home lives of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811--1896), William Dean Howells (1837--1920), Henry James (1843--1916), and Edith Wharton (1862--1937), to highlight the manner in which their houses reflected the seriousness of their literary, as well as architectural and decorative, preoccupations. The project draws upon a wide variety of sources---houses, floor plans, photographs, wills, account books, diaries, letters, notebooks, fiction and non-fiction---and reconstructs each author's life to provide an "architectural biography" of the individual. The dissertation aims to illuminate how and why each of the four authors lived as he or she did; how their choices at home influenced their writing: and how, through their writing, the authors critiqued as well as created American standards of culture and taste. The project brings into conversation the subjects of literature, biography, and architecture, and enables scholars to study American authors "three-dimensionally," through their houses and artifacts, as well as through their writings. It offers a new lens through which to examine the lives and literature of four of America's greatest realist authors.