Taking kids to places and activities that build their brains and broaden their outlook is among the most fun parts of parenting, in my book. From science museums to library events, there are so many fun adventures to have with your child that will shape them for life. And one underrated enrichment activity that should make your list is literary tourism. 

Visiting sites related to children’s authors and books can build or reinforce excitement around reading (and even make a child want to author their own works!)—as well as create a valuable opportunity for learning, conversation, and bonding. 

There are many historic literary sites open to the public, including authors’ homes and other spots. There are also a variety of other places with special homages or connections to specific writers and literature. This list rounds up some of the U.S. sites associated with authors of books for children and teens, to help you plan your own literary adventures with your family. 

You can also do your own research to find locations close to your home or related to your family’s favorite books or authors. Consult the American Library Association’s literary landmarks list, the nonprofit Author Adventures site, the National Register of Historic Places, and library or bookstore events calendars for ideas. 

Before you start, check out these tips for successful literary tourism with kids. 

Literary Tourism Sites for Families

Below is a sampling of U.S. sites associated with various children’s and middle-grade authors (compiled in part from the ALA’s wonderful list, along with other resources). It’s organized by author name, followed by the title of one of their best-known works for young readers. 

Tip: Be sure to check details ahead of time to confirm which sites are open to the public—some can only be viewed from outside—as well as visiting hours and whether reservations may be needed. Call ahead if you can, because sites periodically close for renovations (or even shut down altogether, like the former cottage of children’s poet Robert Frost, which was a museum until it closed permanently for lack of funds).

Children’s Author and Book Tourist Sites

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts is both the setting for Alcott’s 1868 Little Women and where she wrote the novel. The house, originally built about 1650, is now a museum open to the public, with guided tours and information about the members of the real-life Alcott family and how they influenced the fictional characters.

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• This walking tour itinerary through Stamps, Arkansas, where Angelou lived as a child, shows places the author would have known. It includes locations mentioned in her classic memoir and other sites that would have been familiar landmarks. 
• In St. Louis, Missouri, you can see the author’s birthplace and first home in a neighborhood that was segregated at the time. The house is now an official city landmark. 
• In New York, you can walk by the Harlem house that Angelou renovated and occupied part-time later in her life. The house is privately owned.

Lydia Maria Child, Over the River and Through the Woods

• Child was an abolitionist writer known in the 1800s for promoting the rights of Indigenous Americans, enslaved people, and women. These days, she’s remembered for the 1844 Thanksgiving poem usually called “Over the River and Through the Woods.” The Grandfather’s House Historical Marker in Medford, Massachusetts marks the real-life house from the poem, where the author’s grandparents lived. Growing up, Child would visit this site from her home on the other side of the river. The original house is still there, although it was enlarged later in the 1800s.

Louise Erdrich, Birchbark House

• Birchbark Books in Minneapolis is an independent bookstore owned by Louise Erdrich and focused on Native American literature. A unique, eco-friendly space, it features plenty of fun for kids: a selection of children’s books, a birchbark children’s loft, hand-stuffed chairs for kids, a hobbit hole reading nook, and a handmade wooden canoe hanging from the ceiling. There are also rotating displays of works by Native American artisans—and Louise Erdrich will sign or personalize any of her books ordered through the bookstore, according to the website. Check ahead for special events.

Marguerite Henry, Misty of Chincoteague

• Henry’s middle-grade fiction features the wild ponies of Assateague Island on the Maryland-Virginia border. Wild ponies really have lived there for hundreds of years, likely descended from survivors of a Spanish shipwreck. Spectators can watch the annual pony swim, when “saltwater cowboys” herd the ponies through the water from their island home to the nearby Chincoteague Island.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

• The Moseley House in Eatonville, Florida was the home of Hurston’s childhood best friend, and the author often stayed there. It holds a museum with memorabilia of the town, which featured heavily in Hurston’s work. 
• The Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library in Illinois was a meeting place for black literary giants including Hurston, as well as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and many others. 
• Idlewild, Michigan was a vacation spot favored by Hurston, Hughes, and W. E. B. DuBois. The Idlewild Public Library has a literary landmark dedicated in their honor.

Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day

• Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York features a bronze statue of Keats’s characters Peter and Peter’s dog, Willie, in the park’s Imagination Playground. Keats evoked the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up in the award-winning picture books that he wrote and illustrated.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

• The Monroe County Museum in Alabama has an exhibit about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. It includes photos, memorabilia, and a documentary about Monroeville—the author’s hometown and inspiration for her fictional setting—during the 1930s.

Jack London, The Call of the Wild

• The author’s ranch in Glen Ellen, California has been preserved as the Jack London State Historic Park. Visitors can tour numerous buildings, including the cottage that London bought in 1911 and where he wrote many of his later works, as well as explore the grounds and hiking trails.

Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy

• The homes of the author and her best friend in Mankato, Minnesota serve as key settings in Lovelace’s autobiographical historical novels. Both are open to the public with prior reservation, offering a window into early-twentieth-century life and the books’ fictional world.

Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings

• The Boston Public Garden in Massachusetts was the setting for McCloskey’s 1942 Caldecott Medal picture book Make Way for Ducklings and now features a bronze statue of the duckling family. 
• Hamilton Lane Library in Hamilton, Ohio, was a childhood haunt of the author, who was born in Hamilton and whose first book featured scenes set around town, including at the library.

A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh 

• The New York Public Library is home to the original Winnie-the-Pooh teddy bear, along with Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet, and Kanga. The stuffed animals belonged to Christopher Robin Milne, the author’s son, and inspired the iconic characters.

Toni Morrison, Peeny Butter Fudge

• The Toni Morrison Reading Room at the main library in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison grew up, celebrates the Nobel Prize-winning author. It houses a collection of her writings, complete with her works for adults and the lesser-known children’s books Morrison co-authored with her son Slade. A glass wall is etched with an excerpt of Morrison’s Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech. 
• Look for the historical marker in front of Lorain’s Carnegie Center, formerly a library, where Morrison once worked, too. It now houses the Lorain Historical Society—pop inside to get a peak at what Lorain was like in years past. 

Walter Dean Myers, Monster

• The award-winning author and former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature grew up checking out books from the George Bruce Branch of the New York Public Library. The library put up a plaque to the author dedicating it as a literary landmark in 2015. 

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

• Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ house in Cross Creek, Florida, is now a state park, preserved as it was when she lived there in the 1930s. This was where Rawlings lived when she wrote her Pulitzer prize-winning 1938 novel The Yearling, and Cross Creek provides the setting for the book. 

Woodrow Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows

• Rawls grew up on his mother’s Cherokee land allotment in the hills around Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The town now hosts an annual Red Fern Festival ​with all-ages activities, including children’s games, a rubber-duck race on a creek, a coon dog field trials event, and a Miss Red Fern Pageant. 

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

• Visitors to Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, can visit the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden and The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum. The museum contains exhibits in English and Spanish and encourages word play, including rhyming games, making up stories, and prompts to experiment with new sounds and vocabulary.

Gene Stratton-Porter, Freckles

• A pioneering naturalist and popular writer, Stratton-Porter documented the unique “limberlost” swamp ecosystem of Indiana and brought it to life dramatically in her fiction—even as it was rapidly disappearing in real life. Generations after her death, her work inspired nature-lovers to restore a portion of the lost habitat. Now, visitors can see it for themselves at the Limberlost State Historic Site, as well as visit Stratton-Porter’s lakeshore cabin at Wildflower Woods.

Hildegarde H. Swift, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge

• The lighthouse celebrated in Swift’s 1942 children’s book is no longer functioning, but fans worked to save it as a historic landmark. It’s now part of the Historic House Trust of New York City and visitors can see the beloved lighthouse in Manhattan’s Fort Washington Park. 

Kay Thompson, Eloise

• Fans of Thompson’s 1955 picture book can visit the historic Plaza Hotel in New York, the real hotel that served as the setting for the fictional Eloise. Visitors can have afternoon tea in the Palm Court, shop for a wide variety of Eloise-themed products in the Plaza Boutique, and put a message for Eloise into a special mailbox. Those who want to go all out (and drop a small fortune) can even book a stay in a special pink Eloise hotel room.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

• The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri includes the author’s boyhood home, built in the 1840s, and its gardens, as well as an interactive museum with exhibits, films, and more. 
• Bonus: If you want to engage in a little virtual literary tourism, you can take an online tour of Quarry Farm, where Mark Twain created his famous characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. 

Alice Walker, Sweet People Are Everywhere

• Though she won the Pulitzer Prize for her adult novel The Color Purple, Walker has also penned various children’s works, including the 2021 Sweet People Are Everywhere. The Georgia Writers Museum in Eatonville, Georgia—where Walker grew up—features exhibits about the author, and its website gives a day-trip itinerary for an Alice Walker driving tour to places including her birthplace, the Walker family home, and her school. Interesting tidbit: Walker reportedly engaged in a little literary tourism herself, visiting the former home of writer Flannery O’Connor, who influenced her.

Richard Wright, Black Boy

• The library in Memphis, Tennessee once barred young Richard Wright during segregation, although he found a way to get around the ban, a story told in his 1945 autobiography. Nowadays, the Memphis library gives out the Richard Wright Literary Awards annually.

Places to See Picture Book Art

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

• Located in the Five College area of Western Massachusetts, The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art showcases rotating exhibitions of picture book illustrations from around the world in a 40,000 square-foot facility. There’s also a permanent collection with works by Maurice Sendak, Leo Lionni, Rosemary Wells, and others—plus a hands-on art studio for little visitors to make their own art.

• Society of Illustrators’ Annual Exhibit of Children’s Book Art Every year, the Society of Illustrators in New York City puts on an exhibition called “The Original Art” that showcases illustrations from children’s books published in the U.S. during the year.

When my oldest child was about seven, we happened to visit the Jack London State Historic Park, the preserved ranch of the early 20th-century author famous for adventure novels like Call of the Wild and White Fang. 

We were on a family road trip, and the state park offered a convenient stop along the way. As it turned out, it also opened a door into new literary worlds for my son. Realizing a little context would make our spur-of-the-moment stop more interesting, I downloaded an audiobook of White Fang from our public library and handed my son a pair of headphones.

He was fascinated, and it kicked off a love of wilderness adventure stories that wound up driving him to independently read a slew of books starting with the Hatchet series by Gary Paulsen and progressing through a wide variety of other children’s literature. 

Eventually, the rich reading world that had opened up to him led him beyond children’s and middle-grade fiction. Soon, he was devouring all-ages fiction like The Martian by Andy Weir, along with nonfiction like Revenge of the Whale, a young readers’ version of a National Book Award-winning historical tale of a real-life event that inspired Moby Dick.

His reading level skyrocketed, and I’m confident his enjoyment of reading for fun was a huge driver of that. Many things contributed to his love of reading—listening to stories read aloud by me and other relatives, oral storytelling, abundant (if tattered, often free) books—but I think that trip, too, helped build our family culture of excitement around stories, history, and learning.

Some years later, I wound up on another literary adventure, this time with my daughters. We had the chance to visit two beautifully preserved historic homes that belonged to a children’s author and her childhood best friend—both immortalized in a set of autobiographical children’s novels.

The writer, Maud Hart Lovelace, based her Betsy-Tacy series very closely on her life growing up in small-town Minnesota in the early 1900s. The homes of Lovelace and her best friend—Betsy and Tacy in the stories—featured in great detail. The houses have been preserved as historic monuments, offering a fascinating window into both the fictional world and times gone by.

This literary adventure, too, offered up new horizons for my kids. It not only fostered and reinforced excitement around reading, but also opened the door to conversations about history, the interaction between literature and life, and important topics touched on in the books themselves. It also transported all of us, mentally, into a very different time and space, causing us to see the world from another perspective, stretching our thinking and growing our empathy.

It got me thinking about literary tourism with children, and how wonderful and invigorating it is to expand young minds with special experiences. From children’s museums to aquariums, historic sites to art museums, library presentations to author talks to political events, there are fun enrichment options for any family, budget, and interest. (My brother traveled to see an eclipse with his kids, for example.) 

All enrich their minds, build their vocabulary and knowledge, challenge their thinking, and spark their creativity. 

I suggest that literary tourism should be on your list, whether to a local site where you can make a day trip or a farther-off spot you can build a vacation around. Below are a few tips for literary tourism with children and for finding good destinations to get you started. 

Tips for Literary Tourism with Kids

Follow their interests, but build excitement. 

If your child loves a certain author or book, that’s a great place to start exploring literary tourism opportunities—but it’s also powerful to expose them to a new author or book, especially if you model enthusiasm, genuine interest, and curiosity. Ultimately, your choice of destinations will be bounded by what’s in reach within your area, timeframe, or budget. 

Any outing will work best if you’re mindful of your child’s interests and attention span. The Jack London ranch site was a good match for an active seven-year-old, because the historic house tour was balanced with plenty of space for free play outside. Be sure to avoid any obvious mismatches, like taking an easily frightened child on a tour of a “haunted” site that inspired a ghost story! 

If possible, read some of the stories before you visit a literary tourism location, but you can also use an interesting visit to kick off family explorations of a new writer or book series. You can even share a book on the way to or from an excursion. I used to love reading aloud to my kids during road trips (when I was fortunate enough not to be the one driving), but throwing on an audiobook while I drove generally worked just as well.

Wherever you go, bring your sense of fun, curiosity, and patience. Whether or not you got to dig into the relevant stories ahead of time, build excitement on the trip itself through your attitude. Make it fun for your kiddo: get them snacks, take breaks, cut short any parts that just aren’t working for them, and adapt to their mood. 

Most of all, talk to them. Ask them questions, explain things they don’t know or understand, share your reactions, and get them thinking about it all—which brings us to the next point.

Foster curiosity and critical thinking through deep conversation. 

Visiting sites associated with an author or literary work offers an opportunity to discuss important concepts, and often values, with your child. It can open up powerful chances to engage around the author and their works’ context, themes, and impact. Many literary tourism sites are connected with older literature, meaning they introduce children to the relevant historical eras, along with weighty social and political issues from their times. 

For example, the Betsy-Tacy series brings to life a time before TV, when telephones and cars were major novelties. The series also frequently explores themes of standing up for beliefs vs going along with the crowd. One of the books features the characters making friends with a Syrian immigrant, then being faced with an angry crowd taunting their new friend with slurs. 

Another recounts a theatrical production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—an 1852 abolitionist novel credited with building popular anti-enslavement feeling pre-Civil War—complete with white actors in blackface. This was shocking to me, and it might have been tempting to gloss over it or just put the book aside in favor of newer works. But it described a historical reality, and the story proved a valuable opening to broach important, challenging topics in a natural way. 

It got them thinking about why white actors would have played black characters, alongside questions like how popular culture influences politics and the difference between going along with the status quo in a moment in history or trying to rise above it. In the end, it was a chance to impart values, develop their empathy, and foster critical thinking—all in the guise of entertainment and family bonding. 

Mind you, any conversation and engagement with your child during shared experiences will build their knowledge, vocabulary, brain, and bond with you, so don’t worry if you’re connecting around lighter topics! Just talk and reflect—together.

Make literary tourism work for your family’s schedule, budget, and ages.

There’s no one best way to do literary tourism with kids. You don’t have to spend a fortune flying to England to see the stomping grounds of Beatrix—or Harry—Potter or to Japan to trace the origins of your child’s favorite manga. You can likely find various options close to home or in areas you’re traveling to anyway.

There are opportunities for literature-related adventures everywhere. Local libraries often have displays about popular authors and the worlds they write about, book stores host author talks or themed book events, or you could craft a literary adventure to anywhere related to a book’s location, author, or topic. 

A visit to a science museum could be a bookish outing for a child obsessed with Chickasaw American astronaut John Herrington’s Mission to Space—or for one who loved E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (to see an arachnid exhibit). The latter might also love a trip to the countryside that inspired the author, while the former might like to know more about Chicasaw culture if they come from a different background.

Get creative and you can find a way to build literary exploration into your outings, already-planned travel, or spur-of-the moment adventures.

Check out our list of some U.S. literary tourism sites associated with children’s authors, search for sites in your area or vacation destination, or research places associated with a favorite author or book series. 

Tip: Consult the American Library Association’s literary landmarks list, the nonprofit Author Adventures site, the National Register of Historic Places, and library or bookstore events calendars for ideas. Have fun!