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.

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

It was with an unbelievable sense of relief that we got off at the Chenango Bridge exit and called my Aunt Debi, who talked us in to her house, situated in a cul de sac, over a long hill. But my relief probably paled in comparison to that of Felix, who seemed absolutely in heaven at finding himself in a large house, with many toys, and a kind great aunt.

Aunt Debi with the weary travelers

Cooperstown, New York

Cooperstown was a mandatory stop on the tour both for the Baseball Hall of Fame and for its literary significance as the location of James Fenimore Cooper’s father’s house (the town is his namesake) and destination of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe. In fact, the entries on those two authors happen to be the first and last, respectively, of the book. All along the route from Chicago to Cooperstown, we had been on the same latitude, and had seen many V’s of geese winging their way south. On the way we passed an old silo with a huge rent in its side, and an old farmhouse that looked as if it had been stove in by the falling of a giant tree. We passed through a town comprised of fine old houses, lining each side of the road like teeth, in various states of repair. I came to Cooperstown once as a child (my parents finally relented after our endless campaign) and remembered that the drive from he highway to the town seemed too long. It still did, but not so much for me as for our schedule.

In Cooperstown, I snapped a picture of the geese resting on Otsego Lake, which Fenimore Cooper, at his lyric “painter with words” best, dubbed Glimmerglass Lake. 

Statue on the Cooperstown waterfront

The town gave me the impression of a place enslaved by tourism. The shopkeeper at the bat store I went into seemed like he family went back generations in Cooperstown, and that she would have made a fine farmer, or clerk. But there she is selling bats to the great unwashed. The Baseball Hall of Fame has a luster that the bleakness of the season and frigidity of the air could not dim. It is a luster that was lost on the extremely antsy Felix but felt, here and there by me.

I do not mean to romanticize the sorrowful decline of the region and, in the process, belittle the upstate New York region. But I feel I need to bring it up because there, in Upstate New York, which we had been visiting since I was a baby, I finally felt like I was among my people. I felt it more there than anywhere else on the trip (though I had started feeling it as we crossed into Ohio). On our way out, we passed that farm with the rent in the silo and the collapsed house. I wanted to take a picture but I didn’t. For one thing, the house had passed by fast. For another, even as we slowed, I saw that there were still people living on that property. They’d constructed another dwelling but perhaps, I thought, left the ancestral home as it had been smitten.

When I was younger I felt like I knew the spirit of America, could taste the air of America. I went looking for that when researching the book and the visceral sense of it I had felt as a child and a young man eluded me. In upstate New York, it seemed like I found it again. Part of its essence is the lurking tragedy that seems to stalk the region, along with the beauty of its agrarian regions, and its old towns and cities. Perhaps that “America” feeling I had in my youth is something that I outgrew, like the idea that I might become wealthy, or famous. Or perhaps it’s just that I conflated America with towns in upstate New York and the well-preserved towns in Vermont where I grew up. Whatever the truth is, it was comforting and bittersweet to travel through the region once again, on the final stretch of the trip.

The wonderful thing about a cross-country trip is that, by the fact it has a beginning and an end, and a lot of rough terrain in the middle, it takes on dimension, creates its own story. On the day we slipped into the driveway of my parents’ home near Boston, Massachusetts, while they sat visible in the front windows, having cocktails, I felt that we had brought the epic journey to a satisfying close. We were 3,700 miles from where we had started and were coming, in a sense, home.

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.

The torch has been passed to the next generation.

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 was a weekly book columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Elaine Kendall has also written and collaborated on libretti and lyrics for musical plays produced in New York, California, Hawaii and Connecticut. An American Cantata is an adaptation of the late John Sanford’s chronicle of American women, and is available from Samuel French, Inc. The Would-be Diva is a musical comedy based upon the extraordinary life of the Polish-born beauty Ganna Walska. Isadora is a musical drama about Isadora Duncan, and Kendall’s 2003 show is Cole & Will: Together Again, a unique revue melding Cole Porter’s memorable lyrics to appropriate moments from 15 Shakespearean dramas and comedies.

Elaine Kendall is a member of The Authors Guild, The Dramatists Guild, and ASCAP.

Reference quoted from: http://members.authorsguild.net/ekendall/

As preparation, I have been reading a book I once read in paperback, in my teens: Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon, copyright 1982. Least Heat Moon, half Native American (they were called Indians in those days), leans against a cane on the back jacket of the 9^th printing that I borrowed from the library, a short-looking man with a thick head of hair, a pair of suspenders, and a soulful look in his level gaze. If I am right about his stature, it probably served him well for the long journey he took. After losing his job and, to some degree, his wife, he got in a van he named “Ghost Dancing” and drove around the country, sleeping in the van most nights.

“Bust” of William Least Heat Moon

William Least Heat Moon he explained the source of the book’s title thus:

“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back rods blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose itself.”

 

Detail of 1960 road map, with blue highways.

The above passage is typical of Blue Highways. Well-wr0ught, with a sense of rhythm and depth that suggest miles on the highway spent working out the sentences. Least Heat Moon’s observations, I am pleased to say, remain as trenchant as they did when I first read them.

This is the cover of the bestselling paperback I read in my youth

The text has aged well. Sadly, I bet 90% to 95% of the people he profiled along the road—venerable American men and women who were denizens of the blue highways—have passed away.

The atlas I have been consulting for our own travels is “The Mapquest Atlas,” copyright MMIIV, it says (a Roman numeral which doesn’t exist, I think) which I got for free with a book club offer. It is from back in the days when Mapquest was in its ascendancy and Google was perhaps nothing yet but a twinkle in is founders’ eyes. I felt bad obtaining it, with its jaunty Mapquest logo, even though it was free. Road atlases, it seemed to me, were the proper domain of Rand McNally. In my Mapquest atlas, the interstates are blue, with narrow white lines in the middle like a digestive tract, and the blue highways of the past are red or orange or nonexistent. Even when he made his jaunt, it seems like half the towns he visited out of curiosity, towns such as Liberty Bond or Moonax, Oregon, had already vanished from anything but his map. Towns like Nameless, Tennessee had ninety residents and a general store. Nameless has not been effaced. I can call it up on Google maps. The so-called”street view,” shows a bend in the road and the driveway of an unidentified house which seems to be in some other township though.

Blue Highways is great for stirring the traveling blood. And it is useful for travel tips, though I don’t know how well the following one has aged: according to the author, the best kinds of cafe are the ones with the most calendars.

No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.

One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.

Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present.

Three calendars: Can’t miss on the farm-boy breakfast.

Four calendars: try the ho-made pie too.

Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they’ll franchise.

Unfortunately, that is one my little family may have difficulty putting to the test. With an eighteen month-old son, and a limited window of time, we’ll need to keep mostly to the interstates, which generally preclude eating establishments of an original nature. But it is a trip, and a trip all the way across the country, and nothing can take away the epic nature of that.

Book Update: due to a paginating error, what I thought would be a rubber stamp of approval on the plotter proofs turned into another wait for a new set of plotter proofs to be made. I won’t belabor the details of what exactly happened. The lesson learned is that not everything in printing can be anticipated, not even if one has been in the business for over a decade. Tune in again in a few days and I hope you will read that A Journey Through Literary America has gone to press.