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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read. From read from kCRW Santa Monica I'm Michael

Silverblatt and this is bookworm today we continue our special series escaping the cage

identity multiculturalism and writing my guest is J.D. McCauchy author of American

writers at home I'll also be speaking with

Tony Morrison, Joan Didion, and Jonathan Lethem about the impact of place on identity and writing.

Here we are in the midst of the identity series, and as I was dealing with some of the materials, I realized that I hadn't any information about the effect of environment on identity.

Fortunately, I received a book in the mail from the Library of America called American Writers at Home.

It's by J.D. McCauchy, who traveled the country with a photographer, Erica Lennard,

seeing the houses that American writers wrote in.

Now, as I was reading this book, I discovered such a wealth of interesting detail.

I'll give you an example,

that the interior walls of Kate Chopin's house

were made of a mixture of mud, moss, and animal hair

to deter insects.

I mean, you know, I'd never heard of such a thing before.

And then I'm reading in a chapter on Edith Wharton that Edith Wharton thought of

a woman's character, identity as being like a house with many rooms. And I thought of all the

writing that has been done, particularly, say, by Bachelar and the Poetics of Space, that began to describe,

...