A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Ernest Hemingway
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 »
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 »
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 »
Midwest Book Review
Lives up to its title. Illustrated with full-color photography throughout, A Journey Through Literary America is a book for book lovers – surveying great American authors from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. Annie Proulx, and many more. Each author has a brief biographical profile combined with breathtaking photography of the places they lived or that inspired them to create masterpieces. A wondrous tour ideal for enriching any literary collection – and sure to appeal to armchair travelers as well, A Journey Through Literary America lives up to its title and is highly recommended. Read More »
Santa Monica to Denver in Pictures
After Gibbs Smith, a quick trip into downtown Salt Lake City where I visited Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore. It is a real prize of an independent bookstore, with a thriving coffee shop, well-ordered stacks that are low enough that one can get the lay of the land, and a second floor catwalk around the entire perimeter of the bookstore that is filled with shelves upon shelves of books. A rare book room on the second floor invites people to stop on in and browse. It is as if one had died and gone to bookstore heaven. While I waited to speak with Catherine Weller, I chatted with the man at the register who had just finished a multi-volume biography of Ben Franklin. A young lady came up to the register and bought an independent literary magazine I had never heard of from a rack featuring an enviable collection of literary quarterlies and independent literary magazines. I left the store inspired, not least because I think they will take the book. From there a stiff climb up through the mountains, following the same trail that the Mormons took when they came to Salt Lake City. It was arduous [...] Read More »
Subscribe
Subscribe to receive updates and promotions!