Sleeping with Literary Lions: The Booklover's Guide to Bed and Breakfasts

Want to visit your favorite authors? Peggy vanHulsteyn's latest book tells you how to do it from the comfort of your reading chair!Sleeping with Literary Lions is a delightful book for many reasons. Each bookish landmark is reported in colorful detail. The authors linked to a particular place are depicted in fascinating verbal brush strokes, the bed and breakfast inns are clearly described. Best of all, the literary lore is spread as deliciously as raspberry jam on an English muffin.Two years and a nationwide odyssey went into the completion of Literary Lions, a unique combination of guidebook and pithy, anecdotal overview of America's greatest (deceased) authors.Because she majored in English and Journalism in college, vanHulsteyn had an edge in the literature department. Researching for the book, she recalls, was "my own private graduate school. The literary sites I visited were magical and transported me to the pages of the novel I was writing about."vanHulsteyn recounts meeting Ernest Hemingway's 97-year-old former girlfriend Irene Gordon: "She told me about her life with Hemingway. They shared many interests --nature, sports, books. When they played tennis, Irene frequently beat him. She also told me that it was important for her to admire his fishing prowess. Irene had a letter from Hemingway dated September 1, 1949. Though she'd framed the letter and hung it on the wall, she'd never written Hemingway back. At the end of our luncheon, she asked me (only half-joking), 'You don't suppose that's why he committed suicide, do you?' "As I wrote Sleeping with Literary Lions, says vanHulsteyn, "I was constantly surprised." Surprise and delight are also in store for the reader who joins her on these literary excursions.This review is by Elaine Pinkerton Coleman, author of Santa Fe on Foot and The Santa Fe Trail by Bicycle .