A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Monthly archive September, 2009
14 Days and counting
I have visited Salt Lake City several times. When you get on the Interstate near the airport and head East towards Salt Lake City, you see “Cheyenne, Wyoming” on large signs framed against the nearby mountains. I have always been tempted to disregard my immediate purposes and just keep on driving towards Cheyenne. Now I will get my chance. Wyoming is featured in A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA through the stories of Annie Proulx, a former resident of Laramie, Wyoming, who has since moved on to other pastures. One thing I am looking forward to experiencing for myself are the long sightlines. As Proulx told Charlie Rose in an interview, “When you can stand at your kitchen sink and look out your window and see a hundred miles down the road…you’re ‘on the beam.’”[i] She says that Wyoming is her writing place: “You go into it and it’s almost as if you were trailing a little cord behind you, plugged into the side of the mountain.” Researching Proulx led me to Owen Wister as well. Wister, a sickly young man, fell in love with Wyoming on a trip out there and wrote one of the most popular cowboy novels [...] Read More »
15 days and counting
Herd to believe,but in 15 days the booksigning at Santa Barbara’s Chaucer’s Books will be behind us and we (my wife, my son, and I) will be taking to the open road on our way to the East Coast. Our first stop will be Las Vegas. Why? Because it’s there. Though it certainly does have a certain literary and cinematic allusiveness, to boot. I hope that, unlike Hunter S. Thompson, I won’t see giant bats flying at the windshield as we get close. The second stop will be Salt Lake City–city that Wallace Stegner came to consider home, and home to one of my major clients as a printer: Gibbs Smith, Publisher. We will definitely stop in at Gibbs Smith, Publisher, where I want to introduce my son to Marty Lee- Vice President of Production and a fine human being. Gibbs Smith, Publisher grew from very small publisher to one of the powerhouses of the Western United States. Below, some of their history (lifted from their website) The Beginning Gibbs M. Smith always wanted to be a history professor. But while in pursuit of his master’s degree, Smith wrote a dissertation on Joe Hill–American labor martyr, proletarian folk hero, and [...] Read More »
The Advance Copy (and Errata)
Yesterday I couldn’t write about what it felt like to hold the finished book in my hands. The experience was too fresh. Robert Frost said that he always wrote in after thought, after some mulling had taken place and some thoughts had accumulated. That’s how I feel too. But I must say that the spell of the new book was somewhat broken after I leaned the book against something else on the top of my car while I wrestled my son Felix out of the child seat. From where I was on the other side of the car I heard the thud as the book slid off the car and landed on the street. It survived remarkably well (french fold jackets should be required by the government on all books.) A Journey Through Literary America has a promising heft to it. But because of the rounded spine it fits well in the hand. It is a joy to see two years and nine months of work transformed into something so lovely to look at and so portable. I looked randomly at the book: back towards front, here and there. I read two of the entries that I had not read [...] Read More »
Thomas Wolfe: In Memoriam
Again a nod to Today in Literature: on this day, Thomas Wolfe passed away from tuberculosis that had been lurking in his body since he was a boy. He was just shy of 38 years old. The event that occasioned it was an exhausting grand tour of the national parks of the West. Wolfe was a writer for hire on the National Parks project. But no doubt the project appealed to the man who once wrote of his thinly-veiled autobiographical character, George Webber: His life had always seemed to shift between the poles of anchored loneliness and foot-loose voyagings–between wandering forever, and then the earth again–and now the old and restless urgings of “Where shall we go? And what shall we do?” again became insistent, would not down, and demanded of him a new answer. In his introduction to Look Homeward, Angel, Maxwell Perkins quoted a passage from War and Peace that Wolfe loved: “Prince Andrei looked up at the stars and sighed; everything was so different from what he thought it was going to be.” This was a theme for the young Thomas Wolfe, who came to earth trailing clouds of glory, who retained them in his mind but [...] Read More »
The Significance of September 14
If you have not visited Steve King’s Today in Literature, by all means you should. Just click on this link. http://www.todayinliterature.com/ Today happens to be: 1) the day John Gardner, poet, novelist and teacher died at the age of 49. He was the teacher of Raymond Carver, who is featured in A Journey Through Literary America. (As a side dish, King serves up a droll story about Jay McInerney taking Carver’s short story writing class.) 2) The day Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt was published in 1922. Sinclair Lewis is also featured in A Journey. 3) The day James Fenimore Cooper passed away in 1851. Cooper is part of the first entry in the book, entitled “Beginnings.” 4) The day on which I received the first advance copy of the book. It looks fabulous. Pardon me for looking a bit awestruck. Read More »
Memory believes before knowing remembers. (Faulkner)
I am now reading a book I picked up many years ago called New Burlington. It caught my eye because I am from a Burlington—Burlington, Vermont. But this book was about New Burlington, Ohio, a town that has been soaking under the Caesar Creek Reservoir waters for over thirty years. The author, John Baskin, a reporter for a city paper, came to New Burlington in the early 1970’s, was told that it had been condemned for the purposes of making a reservoir, and decided to move in to record the town’s last year. “I have come to live in New Burlington’s last farm house, surrounded by white brick and clean silence. I have come here to understand its death, my life. Nothing is revealed.” New Burlington was like a lot of other villages. It had been settled by people pushing west. Its original buildings were solid mortise and tenon construction. Built so they wouldn’t blow down. There were town characters. And the stories of those characters were handed down from one generation to the next for edification and enjoyment. When New Burlington was settled, it was possible to walk from there to Chicago without ever leaving the forest. Electricity came [...] Read More »
Printing is Finished
Just last week, I came across an e-mail from Tamra from September 1, 2007. It read:”We officially hit the road.” That was the day Tamra and Jacob, and their dog, set out across the country. And today, two years to the day later, Toppan Hong Kong sent the last printed sheets of the book. The printing is done! The printed sheets will now be folded and then sewn together. This process is called Smyth Sewing, after a nineteenth century self-taught Irish American inventor named David Smyth (though I was told it was “Smythe” sewing, and have spelled it incorrectly ever since), who invented the curious looking machine and several other pieces of book making equipment. The Smyth Machine company operated in America for over a century, until the 1970′s, when it sold its intellectual property to Nuova Smyth of Italy, still operational. Over time, that pale young woman operating the treadle was automated. And now, probably the majority of the Smyth binding machines (suitably advanced but still atavistic-looking) are found in China. As I write this entry, an orange moon is rising into the heavens above Santa Monica, a result of [...] Read More »
Elaine Kendall
Elegantly illustrated and written from a unique historical perspective, A Journey Through Literary America reacquaints the reader with the writers who established and continued our literary tradition. Beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, the meticulously chosen photographs not only capture the natural wonders that have dazzled and influenced American writers for three centuries but also offer insight into the settings in which they lived and wrote. A beautiful and necessary book. — Elaine Kendall An author, journalist and playwright, Elaine Kendall has written four books of social history: The Upper Hand, an irreverent account of changing male/female roles; The Happy Mediocrity, an examination of American choices in architecture, food, clothing, manners and mores as they have developed over the centuries; Peculiar Institutions, an informal account of the development of women’s education from pre-revolutionary times to the present, and Seeing Europe Again: Confessions of a First World Traveler; a light-hearted comparison of European and American cultural attitudes. Her articles about art, theater, travel and various aspects of the changing American scene have appeared in Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, Performing Arts, Horizon, American Heritage, Vogue, The Dramatist, Playbill, and many other national magazines. From 1974 to 1997, she [...] Read More »
Subscribe
Subscribe to receive updates and promotions!