Abstract
Challenges to historic house museums are often mired in the rhetoric of crisis. Toward countering that rhetoric, this essay attempts to draw attention to it and to the complicated history of narrative (and storytelling) in interpretation and the academy. It argues that literary house museums are sites of innovation within the house museum sector with lessons for us all. These lessons include a willingness to leverage “the old, bad history” toward reflective practice and continuity for multigenerational audiences; creating inventive university and school partnerships toward insuring strong community stakeholders; embracing the history of race, gender, and sexuality; and perhaps most importantly, making the most of fiction toward embracing multiple points of view about the past.