Fantasy writer George R.R. Martin first began to dream of dragons when he was a child in Bayonne, N.J.

Mr. Martin, 62 years old, says that he grew up in a federal housing project in Bayonne. Because his blue collar family was too poor to travel, "My world was five blocks long," he says. Bayonne is situated on a peninsula, so he would look out the windows of the housing project, stare at the ships in the water, and imagine the places to which they might be journeying, and the stories in which they might become entangled. "My...