A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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 »
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 »
Sherwood Anderson
Clyde “Winesburg” Ohio It was pitch dark and my motel, with its faux colonial columns seemed to be surrounded by empty space when I arrived that night from Lorain, Ohio. I was somewhere near Sandusky. That night I heard the sounds of several freight trains running past, and heard the mournful sound of the whistle. I had forgotten how much I loved that sound. We used to live close enough to the train tracks in the South End of Burlington, Vermont to hear the Central Vermont freight trains that rumbled by. The next morning I breakfasted at the continental buffet. I sampled from many of these “added bonuses” in my journey through Literary America. This one consisted of some bagels and miniature tubs of processed cream cheese, toaster waffles with flavored corn syrup, square slabs of white or wheat bread, already going stale, generally poor coffee. Since dawn had broken, I could see my surroundings, which were pretty much empty fields. I broke camp and got on the road. I wanted to be in Clyde before noon. More evidence of trains in Clyde: separate tracks coming around a bend and converging just before Main Street, before running off into a [...] Read More »
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