A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA

THE LAND WAS OURS BEFORE WE WERE THE LAND'S, Robert Frost wrote. And as we began to populate the vast country after the Revolutionary War, the first American writers began to create the blank continent in their own image. What they said in their own words became part of our own image, in all its joys and sorrows, contradictions, and love for the land.

We readers are usually content to imagine the places that writers describe. For one thing, this country is unmanageably large for us to visit every literary locale. For another, we have all experienced the feeling that what we see in the mind’s eye will differ from the reality. Yet, what if the sensitive lens of a talented photographer could capture a sense of what inspired an author? And what if those images could be accompanied by prose that offers a key to understanding those authors and their locales? Such a book will add a valuable dimension to devotees of American literature and just plain fans of great writing. Like a literary pilgrimage in photography and prose, it visits the sacred sites of 28 of the most influential giants of American literature and brings them to life.

The land is ours. But it is large. How often do you make it to Asheville, North Carolina or Milledgeville, Georgia? Concord, Massachusetts or Red Cloud, Nebraska? This book will take you there and show you what influences worked on Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Willa Cather. Find out which poet built a stone tower with his own two hands on the rocky site of an ancient Indian camp. Meet the novelist, a high school dropout and writer of bad poetry, fired by the post office for refusing to even sell stamps or open the general delivery window, whose towering achievement was to create a fictional county and populate it with unforgettable characters. Follow a mercurial author’s love affair with a town he made famous and how he turned his back on it forever because he believed it resented his success.

Taking in the sweep of American literature from the past to the present, this is a book for the literary enthusiast, for the armchair literary traveler or the intrepid reader. It is a handy and beautifully-illustrated companion to those who seek to learn more about authors they have read and for those who wish to discover new writers. It is also simply a picture book of America. Included are maps on how to get there (even for the locations that only exist in the imagination) because we hope you can go for yourself and experience what has been a tremendously rewarding act of discovery—A Journey Through Literary America.