A writer’s home is a kind of autobiography, and visiting the place where a great work of literature was written gives you a deeper understanding of both the book and the person who wrote it. Here are some famous writers’ houses to check out.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s House

Emerson lived in this house for 46 years until his death in 1882 and wrote his essays Nature and Self-Reliance in a study on the first floor, although his son later said that Emerson’s “real study” was nearby Walden Woods.

Margaret Mitchell’s Apartment

For Gone with the Wind fans, Margaret Mitchell’s house is their dream place. Mitchell moved into Apartment No. 1 of this building when she just got married in 1926 and lived there for six years. She worked on her novel on a table in the living room. When the novel was accepted for publication in 1935, it immediately became a big hit.

William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak

Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home for almost 30 years, is where he wrote many of his major works, including Light in August. In his study, he sometimes wrote his plot structures on the wall, and then painted over them when he finished the book. In fact, you can still see the plot for his novel A Fable penciled on the wall right where he left it.

Ernest Hemingway’s House

Ernest Hemingway lived in this house for the most productive eight years of his life. He wrote most of his major works in his office, which you could only get to by walking across a bridge that extended from the upstairs bedroom. Almost everything in the house had a story.

You know by now that dirt is good for lots of things: growing plants, feeding worms, even the occasional mud bath. But building houses? Absolutely.

People build houses with dirt because it is plentiful, really cheap, and fireproof. Thick dirt walls keep you warm in winter and cool in summer. And you can build a whole house with few tools other than your own two hands.

In fact, dirt is so good for building things that half the people in the world live in houses made of mud. Maybe even you!

Mud works best for building where it’s dry for most of the year. If there’s too much rain, the walls of your mud house could melt like ice cream on a warm day.But in places that don’t see many storm clouds, mud bricks (砖块),which are baked hard in the sun or in a hot oven, can be as strong and durable as stone. In Africa, some mud­brick buildings have been standing for thousands of years.

In the southwestern United States, American Indians built four­story apartment buildings from mud bricks called adobe (土坯). And on the Great Plains, the first white settlers saw an ocean of grass as tall as oxen, but few trees for building houses. So they made their houses out of sod, dirt held together by the thick, tangled roots of prairie grass.

Most sod houses became worm food years ago, but many of the buildings you see every day are pure dirt.The bricks that may make up the walls of your house or school are made of clay that’s been baked in a fiery kiln (炉). So the next time someone says a building is made of bricks, correct them. You know it’s really made of plain old dirt.