A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Featured Authors
Happy Birthday, John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was born 108 years ago today in Salinas, California, the “Salad Bowl of the World.” His family lived in a Victorian house that still stands on one of Salinas’s main streets. It is a restaurant now. And down the street just a couple of blocks sits the National Steinbeck Center, at the head of Main Street, which anchors the Oldtown district of the city. Freight trains crawl along in the near distance, running along the tracks above the underpass that the city’s many visitors use to get to Route 101. Route 101 that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles, running past green fields devoted to crops; some of them traditional, like lettuce, garlic, artichokes and others marking evolutions in America’s gustatory superabundance: maché, nuts, grape vines for wine. The city of Salinas is not a nonpareil of a resort like nearby Carmel. It is not ocean-kissed like its near neighbors of Monterey and Pacific Grove. There are other towns like Salinas that seem down at the mouth, even embittered. But if Salinas does not have the wallet-and purse-opening allure of a place that draws people solely for its beauty, it does exude an air of optimism, of something [...] Read More »
ForeWord Review
The World Is Your Playground by Matt Sutherland Travel, a sense of place, and writers are old friends, and Thomas R. Hummel has written a book that showcases that relationship. In his wonderfully written and packaged project, A Journey Through Literary America (Val de Grace Books, 978-0-9817425-1-9), Hummel chases down the physical landscapes that inspired twenty-six of America’s finest authors, beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper’s Catskills’ haunts in New York, to the Wyoming known and beloved by Annie Proulx. Because many of these locales are spectacularly picturesque, Hummel’s essays are accompanied by more than 140 photographs by Santa Barbara photographer Tamra L. Dempsey. For example, Ernest Hemingway’s writing drew on the summers of his youth, spent on the lakes and rivers of northern Michigan, and Dempsey helps us to understand why. All of the essays include telling passages from the great authors themselves. Read More »
Photographer's Forum Magazine
If you’re a reader, and you’re tuned into the sense of place that is critical to the work of many great writers, this handsome book is for you. The photographs capture the essence of the places that inspired 26 American writers, from Thoreau to Steinbeck to Faulkner to Proulx to Dove. The text is readable, to-the-point, thoughtful and economical, with the photographs providing the perfect amplification. Read More »
Belated Happy Birthdays: Wallace Stegner and Toni Morrison
In case anyone was paying attention, I wasn’t… I missed Wednesday, February 17ths doubleheader: the birthdays of Wallace Stegner and Toni Morrison. To miss the birthday of either one is bad. To miss both is deplorable. My apologies to both. Toni Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio is covered in A Journey Through Literary America. An old African proverb, often trotted out, goes: “It takes a village to raise a child.” Hillary Rodham Clinton, our Secretary of State and the wife of the man whom Toni Morrison famously called “the first black president,” even used it as the title of a book. In the case of Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, the “village” that raised her is the black community in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town on the shores of Lake Erie. With their support and encouragement, she left Lorain after high school for Howard University to make her way in the larger world. “If black people are going to succeed in this culture,” she said in a 1979 interview, “they must always leave. There’s a terrible price to pay.” But, she went on to say, her departure did not take away her power to “savor” that village she left. It [...] Read More »
Diary that influenced Faulkner is unearthed
A clue to the fashioning of Yoknapatawpha County: The New York Times ran a story Wednesday about a diary belonging to some Mississippi slaveholders that appears to have heavily influenced Faulkner. He was fascinated by his contents and apparently took lots of notes. Much of the details in the diaries wound up, in one form or another, in his books. The descendant of the man who kept the diaries suppressed them for years. It was his wife who finally convinced him to make them public (and he doesn’t sound entirely convinced). He is not a Faulkner fan. He let on that he tried to read Go Down Moses once and got so angry that he thew it across the room. What stoked his anger is left a mystery. Speaking of things coming to light: also in the New York Times books section is an article about some Salinger letters, written to his dear friends, that are now being made public. They contain, among other things, the titillating detail that he kept writing long after his vow of silence. But they don’t tell where the manuscripts are buried. TRH Read More »
Ernest Hemingway's Doings in February
February 9th is the date that Ernest Hemingway ended his contract with Boni and Liverwright–one of the most influential publishers of the early part of the 20th century, publishing work by Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck and others. Horace Liverwright also formed the Modern Library in 1917. The company had a sad demise, precipitated by Liverwright’s alcoholism. It has been suggested that Mr. Boni and Mr. Liverwright flipped a coin to decide who would lead the company. Liverwright won control, and the company went down with him. Hemingway was, all things considered, perhaps lucky to extricate himself, though the way he did it was rather unpleasant. For more details, click on this link from Steve King’s fine Today in Literature website. TRH Read More »
Happy Birthday Sinclair Lewis!
On February 7, 2010 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, it is 18 degrees but “feels like 8 degrees” according to Weather.com. This is not so different from this day 125 years ago when Sinclair Lewis was born. It was bitter cold in that day in Sauk Centre (population 2,800). Ice glittered on the 30 lakes that dotted the landscape around the town. The wagon ruts down the mud of Main Street were frozen as solid as the iron-clad wheels that had made them, the ridges at the top brittle and crunchy like exceedingly stale chocolate. The steam from the locomotive of the Great Northern coming into town hung over the rails, too frigid to billow. On that day a baby named Harry Sinclair Lewis was born. No one knows where the Harry came from. Sinclair, the name he adopted as his nom de plume was the surname of a Wisconsin dentist who was a good friend of Lewis’s father. It had only been 24 years since the first white child was born in the former Indian territory. Harry Sinclair Lewis’ parents did not take his convulsive sobbing any more seriously than they would take any other baby’s. Infants find conditions to [...] Read More »
Celebrate Black History Month – Langston Hughes
I have been remiss. Yesterday (February 1) was the birthday of Langston Hughes and the kickoff to Black History Month. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, at the beginning of he last century. He lived briefly in Mexico with his father, whom he disliked intensely. He was “discovered” in Washington, D,C, by Vachel Lindsay when, working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel, he slipped a few poems to the Lindsay in the dining room as the august poet was eating dinner. Although by that time Hughes had already won awards for his writing, he was briefly celebrated as the “busboy poet.” Hughes’s poetry was often deceptively simple. His life was also rich with ironies. There was that breakout moment at the Wardman Park Hotel. Later, there was a wealthy white patroness in New York City who decided that Hughes was her vehicle for uplifting the African American race. Hughes would riding to performances in her limousine during the days of the Great Depression, while others slept on park benches, and realized he wasn’t cut out for that kind of plush life. His poetry suffered. Both Hughes’ life and his poetry were rich with the suggestion of jazz and [...] Read More »
The Paris Review Interviews
It is now two decades ago that I got my first job after college: as assistant to the manager of Access Services of Gelman Library, George Washington University. I had come to Washington, D.C. with hopes–no, expectations–of landing a well-paying job in editing or some other aspect of publishing. After several months of rejections (it was not as bad a time to come out of college as it is now, but the class of 1990 graduated only a three years after Black Monday, the day on which the Dow plunged over 22% and bankers jumped out of windows) I fell back on the only relevant work experience I had and applied for jobs at the library. I wore a suit (I had two) to my job every day. I had a variety of ties. I was half convinced the job would be a steppingstone to some other management position and half in utter denial of the fact that I had put my shoulders in the harness of a 9-5, 40 hour per week job. I wanted to be a writer. It was there, in the Gelman stacks, that I discovered the collected Paris Review interviews–an impressive row of hardbound volumes, featuring [...] Read More »
Seven Days
Former Vermonter Creates an American Literary Journey State of the Arts By Amy Lilly When you read poems or novels, you may wonder how much they reflect the authors’ own experiences — particularly when their work is strongly rooted in a sense of place. Think Willa Cather and the Nebraska plains, or Langston Hughes and the streets of Harlem. For ex-Vermonter and literature enthusiast Thomas R. Hummel, writers’ firsthand experiences of place are fascinating in themselves — and have become the subject of his beautifully produced coffee-table book A Journey Through Literary America. Now settled with a family in California, Hummel grew up in Burlington and earned his bachelor’s in English and German literature at Middlebury College in 1990. It was partly his fond memories of the Queen City that inspired him to look into how this country’s writers experienced the places they wrote about. For the book, Hummel wrote absorbing bios of 26 American writers, four of them poets, whom he chose from an original list of 50 authors “who wrote with a descriptive sense of place.” Photographer Tamra L. Dempsey drove 15,000 miles over the course of a year to shoot the houses, neighborhoods and skylines that helped [...] Read More »
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