Jonathan Lethem, one of Brooklyn’s Brooklyniest bards, famously described his native borough thus: “Brooklyn is repulsive with novelists, it’s cancerous with novelists.” Evan Hughes’s  recent book Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (Holt, $16) reminds us that it has always been so. On a cold but sunny afternoon last weekend, with my copy of Hughes’s book in hand, a friend and I went in search of some literary landmarks. (No living authors. Rest easy, Mr. Whitehead and Mr. Foer: we were not trying to take pictures of your houses.) The following walking tour takes you from the northeast corner of Fort Greene (if you go a little further north and a little further east, you can hit one of the only remaining residences of Walt Whitman: we struck out with Brooklyn’s greatest poet) across downtown Brooklyn, up through all of Brooklyn Heights, and around DUMBO.

The first stop in Fort Greene was Marianne Moore’s old building, number 260 on quiet, residential Cumberland Street.

This was the only house that had any sort of historical marker. There’s a plaque outside that acknowledges the building’s role in literary history. It also helpfully indicates Ms. Moore’s baseball preferences:

From there, we walked across Dekalb to Clinton Avenue. Situated on the intersection’s northeast corner at number 288 is this renovated building, which was once home to Henry Miller. (I’m sure this girl will be thrilled to know I captured her mobile breakfast.)

Not the most exciting stop on the tour. Henry and June moved here in the mid-1920s “when money ran dry,” according to Hughes. Miller’s old haunt is easily overshadowed by a number of much grander-looking buildings along the same beautiful street—including its immediate neighbor to the north:

Henry and June apparently felt the sting of living so shabbily on such a nice street. Some years later, when times were better, the Millers moved to this house a couple blocks up at 180 Clinton Avenue:

This building is near the busy intersection of Clinton and Myrtle, where you’ll find no fewer than three banks. (Including BofA and Citi, in case you’re nearby and in need.)

If you walk a couple blocks west along Myrtle and take a short jog down Carleton Avenue to number 175, you’ll find this building, where Richard Wright lived for a brief time with “prominent Communists” Herbert and Jane Newton.

This building is across the street from the headquarters of the rather terrifying-looking Prayer Balance Ministry.

Heading further west along Myrtle, you pass the north side of Fort Greene Park. While we didn’t find any extant Whitman houses, we did find this reminder of Fort Greene’s finest: a housing project across from the park bears his name.

 The next part of the tour was pure disappointment. Downtown Brooklyn, it turns out, retains little of its bookish heritage. In a way, it was instructive. Where poets once lived, now you’ll find steakhouse chains, conference centers, and corporate complexes. This is the view from a large office building that replaces a house Whitman lived in:

But despair not, trekkers: Brooklyn Heights awaits you. If Evan Hughes had covered only Brooklyn Heights, he still could have written a book about 80 percent as long as Literary Brooklyn. This is the most aesthetically pleasing and fantastically unaffordable area we visited. Starting off at the southeastern section of the neighborhood, you’ll find this narrow house at 102 Pierrepont Street, where Norman Mailer lived with his parents after he graduated from Harvard and before he went off to war:

(It’s the white one in the middle.)

Just two blocks away at 70 Willow Street, you’ll find this double-wide house that belonged to Oliver Smith, the Broadway set designer. Truman Capote lived here for ten years. Hughes notes that “it was recently available for $18 million.”

 Now it’s right next door to a rather uninviting Mormon church:

One block over, you’ll find what has to be the most densely literary street in history: Columbia Heights. Why did so many of our greatest writers choose Columbia Heights? Well, the houses on the west side of the street all back up to the Promenade, a narrow picturesque park with incredible views of the river and the southern tip of Manhattan. If you easily suffer from real estate envy, I suggest you avoid this portion of the tour altogether. Old Hank Miller called these buildings “the dreary mansions of the rich.”

First up, at number 190, this brownstone was once home to poet Hart Crane. He moved here shortly after he finished The Bridge in 1929.

Just up the block at number 142 is the house Norman Mailer bought in 1962 and kept for the remaining forty-five years of his life.

 At a certain point, you’ll begin to feel Brooklyn’s literary history more as an absence than a presence. This park replaces a building (110 Columbia Heights) that was lived in by both John Dos Passos and Hart Crane:

 If you follow Columbia Heights up toward DUMBO, you’ll eventually find this building around the corner at 2 Water Street, where Paul Bowles used to live:

I know it looks a little dusty, but all those people in there are paying fifty dollars for brunch, minimum.

Finally, we headed back east along Front Street to take one last look for a Walt Whitman building. Where he used to live at 120 Front Street is now the base of the Manhattan Bridge:

I hate the word “poignant,” but it did seem a little poignant. We remember him for, among other things, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” As the ferry became obsolete with the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, Whitman’s lingering physical presence in the borough diminished. But the poem reminds us, if the place doesn’t: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence / I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.”

Evan Hughes’s Literary Brooklyn is available from Holt

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