No Castles on Main Street

By Stephanie Kraft

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140057293
• ISBN13: 9780140057294
• Release Date: November 1980
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 239 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 1.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Pleasurable reading, 5 stars; Usefulness as is, 4 stars

In the 1970s, Stephanie Kraft packed up her family and traveled the country visiting the sites of homes of 30 American authors who lived from the late 18th to the mid-20th century. The resulting book, NO CASTLES ON MAIN STREET, is a fine collection of essays on places that influenced the writers who lived in them. Kraft has a Ph.D. in literature and is a freelance writer, and she marries crtiical readings of the authors' works and lives with a graceful knack for description. She offers a tour of the houses as she found them. The majority of the writers are recognizable as belonging to the American canon; some names have lost visibility as we've entered the 21st century but Kraft makes a strong case for their validity. As for usefulness, having not been revised in over 20 years, the guide to house museums and parks is no longer reliable. While the pleasure in reading the essays is unsurpassed, and while the perspective is original and rekindles interest in some aspects of these writers and their works that may be lost to footnotes, most of the information is no longer groundbreaking for scholars or biographers. The black and white photographs have darkened in the aged paperback edition, too.