Greenwich Village Authors on Autumn
“O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.”
— Excerpt from the poem “A Boy’s Will” by Robert Frost, who lived at 107 Waverly Place.
So many incredible, diverse literary icons have lived in Greenwich Village, drawing inspiration from their surroundings. Village Preservation’s “Homes and Haunts of Great Writers” tour on our “Greenwich Village Historic District: Then & Now” map features a great number of these poets, novelists, essayists, and other writers who spent time in the neighborhood in the 19th and 20th centuries.
While one can surely find musings on nearly any topic among the bounty of work produced by these great writers, the following assemblage focuses on early fall, in honor of the season:
E. B. White, 112 West 13th Street and 16 East 8th Street
Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985), famed author of the children’s novels Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, lived in Greenwich Village for about a decade in the early 20th century. Better known as E.B. White, the author was born in Mount Vernon, New York, as the youngest of six children. In the mid-1920s, upon graduating from Cornell University, White moved to New York City, into a two-room apartment on the third floor of the four-story row house at 112 West 13th Street. In 1930, White married Katherine Angell, a fiction editor at the New Yorker, where he had become a regular contributor three years prior. He moved into her apartment at 16 East 8th Street, and the couple continued to live there until 1935.
“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”
Excerpt from “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White, published on October 15, 1952.
Edgar Allan Poe, 137 Waverly Place
How could we possibly compile a list of Greenwich Village authors during spooky season without including Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), best known for his short stories about the mysterious, disturbing, and grotesque?
Poe’s first home in New York City was at 137 Waverly Place, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place, in 1837. He took up residence there with his wife Virginia and his mother-in-law. They did not stay in the building for long, but would remain in the Village, moving in the spring of that year to 113 1/2 Carmine Street (located in the Greenwich Village Historic District Extension II). He would return to Waverly Place in later years to attend Ann Charlot Lynch’s famous literary salons with the likes of William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, R. H. Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor.
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was — but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.”
Excerpt from “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe, first published in September 1839.
Djuna Barnes, 5 Patchin Place and 45 Grove Street
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) first came to Greenwich Village in 1915, becoming part of the growing ‘bohemian’ community. Barnes first shared an apartment on Greenwich Avenue with Berenice Abbott, Kenneth Burke, and Malcom Cowley. She left the Village in 1921 for Paris, and after a tumultuous few years, returned to New York City in 1929. Though she is most often associated with her home at 5 Patchin Place, where she would live for nearly half her life, she also took up residence for a time at 45 Grove Street, with her partner Thelma Wood.
Barnes moved to 5 Patchin Place in 1941. She became a recluse, writing and living out the last 42 years of her life there. E. E. Cummings, who lived at 4 Patchin Place, was known to check up on her by shouting through his window: “Are you still alive, Djuna?”
Love Song in Autumn
The wind comes down before the creeping night
— Djuna Barnes, September 1923. Published in Vanity Fair.
And thou, my love, art hid within the green
Long grasses. And the dark steals up between
Each leaf, as through the shadow quick with fright
The startled hare leaps up and out of sight.
The hedges whisper in their loaded boughs
Where warm birds slumber, pressing wing to wing,
All pulsing faintly, like a muted string
Above us, where we weary of our vows—
And, hidden underground, the soft moles drowse.
E.E. Cummings, 4 Patchin Place
Like Djuna Barnes, the poet e.e. cummings (1894-1962) lived at Patchin Place for four decades, until his death in 1962 (the two writers overlapped there for about 20 years). Though already featured in our spring poetry round-up, he wrote so poignantly about all seasons:
a wind has blown the rain away and blown
a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long
(and what have you to say,
wind wind wind—did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start
the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration………a wind has blown the rain
away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
the trees stand. The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.
— e. e. cummings, first published in 1923
View Village Preservation’s “Greenwich Village Historic District: Then & Now” map here, and click on the “Homes and Haunts of Great Writers” tour to explore further.