Our homes can both shape and reflect who we are as people. When it’s a creative, the home can even influence the very work they’re remembered for. Whether its Hemingway’s Key West retreat or a clapboard farmhouse where Louisa May Alcott dreamed up her little women, seeing where authors slept and ate and rambled and wrote can give us glimpses into the minds that gave us some of of our most treasured works of fiction.

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Or, you know. You can check out some pretty cool houses for less romantic reasons like architecture, history, and design.

To each his own. Just keep reading!

#12. Virginia Woolf

She and her husband lived in an unassuming 17th-century East Sussex, England cottage. It’s hard to believe from its ordinary appearance that it was the historic site of the famous Bloomsbury Group meetings.

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#11. Robert Graves

The famous British author is probably most well-known for I, Claudius, though he was a successful poet, novelist, and critic. Later in life, he settled into this beautiful estate on Mallorca, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea.

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#10. Charles Dickens

Dickens and his new bride moved into this gorgeous, central London home before he wrote Oliver Twist and became a household name. It was converted into a museum in 1925.

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#9. Victor Hugo

Did you know the mind behind Les Misérables was exiled by his government prior to its creation? Well, he was. And he settled in Guernsey, a small island between France and England.

Photo Credit: Instagram, @maella.l.c

#8. Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy was born, lived, wrote his famous works, died, and was buried on this same property in Tula Russia. Known as Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy referred to his home as his “inaccessible literary stronghold.”

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

#7. Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov lived on one of three family estates near Siversky, located in the northwestern corner of Russia. Even though he eventually fled his home country, this house – known as Rozhdestveno – holds a museum dedicated to him.

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#6. F. Scott Fitzgerald

In a not-so-surprising twist, Fitzgerald penned his most popular novel (during his lifetime), This Side of Paradise, while living at home with his parents in St. Paul Minnesota.

Photo Credit: Instagram, @ca_lebron

#5. Stephen King

King lives in a (relatively) modest home in Bangor, Maine.

Photo Credit: Instagram, @summeronrepeat

#4. Mark Twain

Twain lived with his family in this massive Victorian Gothic in Hartford, Connecticut and wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from a second floor study.

Photo Credit: Instagram, @mutsumi84

#3. Herman Melville

Melville moved his family into this quaint homestead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1850, and penned Moby Dick within its walls. The home is a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

#2. Gore Vidal

Coming in with perhaps the most dramatic architecture is this cliffside home in Ravello, Italy. Named La Rondinaia – Swallow’s Nest – Vidal lived and worked there from 1993-2004, when he moved back to Los Angeles full time.