Do Authors Write Where They Know?

Woolf lived quite a fixed life: She lived in England throughout, maintaining a London residence for most of that time. She spent her childhood summers at St. Ives in Cornwall, which inspired the setting for To The Lighthouse, one of her most acclaimed works. Most of her writing is England-centric, with only brief sojourns elsewhere. Even the ship that forms the setting for The Voyage Out is a microcosm of Edwardian London society, which Woolf was well acquainted with. For most of her career, she set her books in the present or immediate past; for example, Mrs. Dalloway, written in 1925, takes place on a single day in post-World War I London.

Fitzgerald mainly grew up on the East Coast, and it shows in his writing. His first three books are set entirely in New York and New Jersey. The fictional West Egg, which forms the setting for The Great Gatsby, is based on Great Neck, the area of Long Island he lived in for three years. His later works – like his later life – take place further afield, traveling across Europe and journeying to Los Angeles. While he never lived in the specific places that Tender Is The Night lingers in, his years spent in Europe inform the work, giving the backdrop to Dick and Nicole Diver’s story a casual specificity, one that’s evident from the novel’s very first paragraph. His penchant for using familiar settings continued through his final novel,The Last Tycoon, in which he takes on the world of Hollywood, where he spent his last few years writing film scripts.

Orwell lived a life in transit; he rarely ever settled anywhere for over two years. Perhaps relatedly, his best works of fiction, Animal Farm and 1984, are not specifically concerned with evoking a sense of place; their preoccupations are more political. His lesser-known works, however, all explicitly draw on locations he’d lived in, as does some of his nonfiction, such as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road To Wigan Pier.

Geographical setting isn’t something Shirley Jackson’s best work much concerns itself with. Her books are in the tradition of Gothic horror, which places utmost importance on the structure in which the action unfolds: The genre was in fact named for its sinister settings’ style of architecture. Jackson’s modern Gothic novels intimately acquaint readers with the layouts and quirks of the buildings at their centers, such as the Vermont estate of We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the titular Hill House. But these buildings could, for the most part, be anywhere, because the action takes place in the protagonist’s psyche.

Salinger is a New York City writer, through and through. He grew up in Manhattan, spending a good amount of his adult life in the city as well. His literary career hit its stride when he was first published in the New Yorker, to which he then onward frequently contributed. Most of his stories and novellas follow the fictional Glass family, who reside in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. While his ubiquitous book, The Catcher in the Rye ventures beyond NYC to a school based on one he briefly attended in Wayne, PA, as well as fleetingly to Los Angeles, it’s clear that New York shaped and formed the backdrop of most of his published creative output.

Morrison set her first novel in Lorain, OH, where she grew up. “I am from the Midwest, so I have a special affection for it. … No matter what I write, I begin there,” she said in a 1983 interview. However, many of her narratives unfold in places she never lived. This is likely because, more than mining her specific experiences for her work, Morrison explored and cataloged the African-American experience – fundamentally reshaping the canon of black literature as she did so. In the same interview, she adds, “Ohio offers an escape from stereotyped black settings. It is neither plantation nor ghetto.” When she chose Ohio as a setting, she did so not only for her familiarity with the place, but also for its ability to aid her in liberating black characters from contexts they had long been confined to.

Ishiguro’s family immigrated to Britain from Japan when he was only five years old. In his wonderful 2017 Nobel lecture, he outlines his experiences grappling with his identity in relation to his geocultural roots, both as a child and an adult. He cites as a pivotal moment in his literary career the night he found himself “writing, with a new and urgent intensity, about Japan” after a few weeks of attempting to set a story in Britain. That night sparked a journey that would turn into his first novel A Pale View of Hills. The book, he says, was his way of preserving a Japan that was borne of and existed only in his mind, “to which (he) in some way belonged, and from which (his) drew a certain sense of (his) identity.”

Hosseini’s stories and characters are greatly shaped by his own experience of immigration. Two of his three books travel the same path he did, from Kabul to California. And the Mountains Echoed even makes a stop in Paris, where his family spent four years waiting for unrest in Afghanistan to pass. Their eventual inability to return brought about their seeking political asylum in the U.S. and moving to San Jose. Hosseini’s repeated literary traversal of this path brings out how pivotal this prolonged experience of unsettlement and immigration was to his life and worldview.

As we’ve already seen, Smith’s creative output is very influenced by where she’s lived. At the 2017 event I mentioned earlier, she said she was working on a novel set 150 years in the past ... but still based in Willesden. I can’t wait to read that book.

Ng’s two novels take place in Ohio, where she spent eight years of her childhood. Her second book, Little Fires Everywhere all the more specifically unfolds in Shaker Heights, OH, the city she lived in. Analyzing the work of two early-career writers – Ng and Sally Rooney – highlighted to me how likely writers’ earliest works are to draw on childhood abodes. Almost every writer on this list set their earliest work where they grew up – even Shirley Jackson, who pretty much abandoned geographically locating her novels halfway through her literary career.

Rooney is kind of a big deal, both in literary circles and beyond, these days. Her two novels resonate world over because they’re about interpersonal relationships and emotional intimacy. It can only help that they’re set in locations Rooney is intimately familiar with – Dublin and County Sligo, Ireland.