Take a Literary Tour of Downtown Savannah

Before becoming a Pulitzer Prize winner and a U.S. Poet Laureate, Conrad Aiken began life here in “that most magical of cities, Savannah” in 1889. Today, you can find him resting in Bonaventure Cemetery, where his epitaph reads “Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown.”

Button Gwinnett was one of only two representatives from Georgia to sign the Declaration of Independence. He would eventually be killed in a duel with his political rival, Lachlan MacIntosh.

A good author is hard to find! Iconic Southern writer Flannery O’Connor spent the first 15 years of her life in Savannah. Despite her literary talents, one of her biggest claims to fame might be that she owned a chicken that could walk backwards.

Completed in 1915, the Carnegie Library was established as a black alternative to Savannah’s segregated “whites only” library. James Allen McPherson, the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, used this library as a child. He said of this location, “I can’t say what the library meant to others, but I am sure that I would not be here, as a teacher of young writers or as a writer, if the resources offered by the library had not been available.”

Prominently featured in John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the beautiful Mercer House is probably best known as the site of the infamous killing of Danny Hansford by his lover and the home’s owner, Jim Williams. Williams would be famously tried not once, not twice, but four times for the murder before being ultimately acquitted. The home takes its name, however, from the great-grandfather of one of Savannah’s most famous sons, songwriter and lyricist, Johnny Mercer.

Since 1978, writers and readers of all ages have found a home among the cozy shelves of this book nook. At The Book Lady Book Store you can have the same experience alongside hard to find out-of-print editions, inspirational new poetry, and inviting coffee table books.

You can’t talk about Shaver’s without mentioning its three resident cats: Bartleby, Mr. Eliot, and Skimbleshanks! These friendly felines love visitors and are often found lounging in the windows or on the many comfortable chairs among the rows of books.