If you take Einstein's representation of time as the fourth dimension, you can imagine the 4-D cube as a series of cubes, each replacing the former, as time progresses. I think, though, that the term "tesseract" actually refers to the representation of a 4-D object in 3-D space. IIRC, Carl Sagan did a bit about tesseracts and higher-dimensional geometries in the "Cosmos" series.
"--And He Built A Crooked House" was originally published in 1940. It appears in the collection The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein which was published in 1999. That's a good collection to look for, by the way, because it includes the classic stories "Magic, Inc.", "Waldo" (yes, Heinlein coined the word) and "--All You Zombies--" as well as four other good stories.