A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
James Fenimore Cooper
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 »
Shelf-Awareness
Gift Books for the Holidays, Part III This absolutely gorgeous book belongs in every book lover’s library. Beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, ending with E. Annie Proulx and Richard Ford, Thomas Hummel examines the relationship between place and an author’s identity, writing about 26 authors, with brief biographies and excerpts of their prose. Tamra Dempsey’s photographs are the perfect enhancement to Hummel’s essays. Willa Cather is evoked with golden prairies and a farmhouse in a sunset-red sky; Langston Hughes with brownstones and Bailey’s Funeral Home in Harlem; Raymond Carver with the site of his childhood home in Yakima (“living on a staple of bitterness”) and the Cornerhouse Restaurant and the marina in Port Angeles. Original: http://news.shelf-awareness.com/mv/a1/801347.html Read More »
Binghamton New York to Boston
Hudson to Binghamton was a long stretch of empty highway, often squeezed down to one lane in each direction (though TARP was not officially credited) with some of the tiredest looking traffic cones I have ever seen. The view from the highway was of trees, more of a mix of firs than I had seen, the occasional Quonset hut, of exits for towns like Panama and Cuba and Coopers Plains (which I thought might have been a model for Fenimore Cooper but might actually be named after an Australian town), some beautiful, stark countryside. As it grew dark, the signs telling how many miles to Binghamton ceased. It was with great relief that we finally entered the outskirts of the connected communities of Vestal (where my mother was born), Endicott, Johnson City, Binghamton, and Chenango Forks. Once mighty manufacturers of the Empire State, they are now remnants of their former selves. The people of these towns knew how to make things once. Great things. It is one of the heedless cruelties of capitalism that the factories that made the region prosperous have pulled out or gone under. It was with an unbelievable sense of relief that we got off at [...] 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 »
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 »
Blue Highways
It is now August 12th. In less than two months, my wife and son and I will be hitting the road in a one-way Budget SUV rental, headed from Santa Monica, California to Boston, Massachusetts. It will be a reverse journey in terms of the history of American literature: the California coast that became a symbol of promise—of sunshine and well-defined noirish shadows—backwards through Salt Lake City—the location that Brigham Young declared was “the right place” for his band of followers in 1847, eastward over the Rockies, through the prairies and past the isohyetal line of rainfall that defines the American Desert, back through the settlements of farms and white houses of Illinois and Ohio. A stop along the way will be Cooperstown, New York, founded by the father of James Fenimore Cooper—once the greatest “painter” in words of the American landscape. Then we will pass through the Berkshires of Massachusetts (once home to Melville and Hawthorne) on the way to Boston and to Concord, where the first shots of the Revolutionary War had been fired, and the first blood spilled, before Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Alcott made it their home. As preparation, I have been reading a book I [...] Read More »
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