If These Walls Had Ears: The Biography of a House - Hardcover

The 1920s-era house on Holly Street had a wrap-around porch, lots of bedrooms, and a central hall with seven doors. It also had ghosts - the joys and pains and human dramas of its residents. Before long, James Morgan, its newest occupant, found himself wanting to learn about the seven other families who had called 501 Holly Street their home. If These Walls had Ears recounts his search to find them, and his discovery of America's social and cultural past through the stories of these real people's lives. Against a backdrop that spans from the Roaring Twenties through the Depression and world war, then from postwar optimism to end-of-century uncertainty, he uncovers tales of bankruptcy, family feuds, lawsuits, personal betrayal, fire, cancer, accidents, the grief of a loved one lost to AIDS. But amid the deep drama, there's also high comedy - teenage girls sneaking out bedroom windows to meet boyfriends, even a gaggle of men in dresses roller-skating through the living room. In telling these stories, James Morgan brings us a story that is known to every one of us in every house in America - the ongoing search for a place that feels like home. As the author discovered why people built, bought, and sold his house, he began to understand the bone-deep link between our homes and our dreams, the state of our relationships, and our hunger for roots and security. At middle life in middle America, James Morgan has written a book about universals of the human condition, about leaving home and coming back, and about finding the place you want to settle down in and stay, within four walls - and within yourself.

Seeking ``continuity, connectedness, permanence,'' Morgan, a former editor at Playboy, tells the rich and profoundly human history of his 70-year-old Little Rock, Ark., house, and of the people and families who lived there. Built in 1923 by Charlie and Jessie Armour, 501 Holly Street (in Bill and Hillary's old neighborhood) is ``a bungalow in the Craftsman style . . . low-slung and solid.'' Morgan became intrigued with the two-story, 3,200-square-foot structure and with those who once called it ``home.'' Preliminary digging led him to the elderly daughter of the Armours; she shared family albums and often quite personal recollections, as did many of the former residents. Births, weddings, divorces, menopausal crises, marital spats, parties, rebellions, bankruptcy--life and all its joys and trials are recorded here. The Armour family would stay in the house through the Depression and WW II; the next tenants, the Murphrees, lived at 501 Holly ``for nineteen long years, from the big band era to the Beatles.'' Morgan takes it as a sign of social and cultural change that the first two families lived in the house for a total of 43 years, while the next six owners have come and gone over the past 29. As the other families move in and out, the author peels away layers of paint, wallpaper, linoleum, and carpeting, recording renovations and repairs as well as changes in decor. But this chronicle, ostensibly about the house, becomes finally a history of the concept of ``home'' in America over the past three-quarters of a century. Morgan, following two emotional divorces and unhappy uprootings from earlier homes, finds himself rejuvenated and grounded here. ``This old house,'' he writes, ``with its flawed past and its walls gone gray, will always be identified in my memory as the place where I knocked and they let me in.'' A rich, profound, fully realized study of how a house becomes a home. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.