A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Philip Roth
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 »
Who Says “You Can’t Go Home Again”? Book Signing – Burlington, Vermont
Near the end of the posthumously published You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe muses, through the eyes of his literary alter ego, George Webber “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” According to a superb website simply called “How Books Got Their Titles,” Wolfe got the title for his novel while having dinner with a friend. He told her how people of his home town of Asheville were really quite put out by his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, going so far as to make threats on his life (even today those feelings have not died. Rumor has it that the fire a couple years ago in the Thomas Wolfe house was set by unforgiving descendants of slighted Ashevillians). His companion commented: “But don’t you know you can’t go home again?” [...] Read More »
Red Cloud, NE to Omaha, NE
What came down had to go back up. We returned from Red Cloud to the Interstate via Hastings, passing a Pony Express Road on the way. We drove by Valentino’s on the city’s main drag, the pizza and pasta buffet highly touted by AAA that is not going to make the Journey Through Gustatory America tour book. There was a bookstore in Hastings that I had made an appointment to stop by but they were closed that Sunday—or so I came to believe, when I called their number twice and it rung 15 times without a response. When you make a cross-country tour you begin to get a feel for the long roads, a broader vision. Quite a few Americans live most of their lives along sections of highways that, as stretch hundreds or even thousands of miles in one direction or the other. When I was growing up we lived along Route 7, which ran to the Canadian border in one direction and to Norwalk, Connecticut in the other. I, who possessed none of the geographical acumen my two brothers inherited (somehow the Cartography Fairy skipped over me), assuredly had no idea of its length until I was much [...] 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 »
The Book Tour 2009
Happy Columbus Day! One day out of the year which would seem to be a harbinger of a successful journey (though perhaps not success in arriving at the destination you had thought you reached. If we took Columbus as our example we might end up in South Carolina and start asking the “Bostonians” there where we could get some tickets to Fenway Park). Today we got no further east than Sawtelle Boulevard, where we stopped for some sushi rolls for lunch after taking our son to the doctor. He developed a fever the day after his revels at the book launch party (so, apparently, did Tamra’s brother’s seven year old daughter, whom the eighteen-month old Felix developed a strong liking for). It only took the pediatrician about three seconds to determine he had the beginnings of ear infections in both ears. Given Felix’s usual ability to make a rapid recovery (he performed the same trick on the eve of a planned trip to Yosemite, which we subsequently cancelled) we have plans to light out for Vegas tomorrow. We picked up our white Dodge mini-van this morning without incident. Seems somehow appropriate that we will be driving a mini van manufactured [...] Read More »
Santa Barbara Independent
America’s Places in Literature It’s the Journey, and It Is the Destination Maybe it’s these “tough economic times” we keep hearing about, or Ken Burns’s latest documentary on our country’s greatest idea, or even the fervent debate on health-care reform: but it feels like everyone is eagerly trying to define America. Not the United States, or the U.S.A but America, in its glorious, romantic connotation. I’m not sure writer Thomas Hummel and photographer Tamra Dempsey attempted a definition in their new project titled A Journey Through Literary America, but they certainly succeeded in living, and capturing, one of America’s defining features: the journey itself. One dog named Sherpa, two years, and 20,000 miles after embarking upon the oldest of American traditions, they’ve created a beautiful coffee-table book that combines a stirring narrative of America’s literary heritage with fantastic, sweeping photographs of places that inspired American authors. “For the last 12 years, I’ve been thinking about a coffee-table book that hasn’t been done,” said Hummel, who came up with the idea for the book. “While I was reading American Pastoral, I realized Phillip Roth had some vivid descriptions of places in Newark, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do [...] Read More »
Thomas Wolfe: In Memoriam
Again a nod to Today in Literature: on this day, Thomas Wolfe passed away from tuberculosis that had been lurking in his body since he was a boy. He was just shy of 38 years old. The event that occasioned it was an exhausting grand tour of the national parks of the West. Wolfe was a writer for hire on the National Parks project. But no doubt the project appealed to the man who once wrote of his thinly-veiled autobiographical character, George Webber: His life had always seemed to shift between the poles of anchored loneliness and foot-loose voyagings–between wandering forever, and then the earth again–and now the old and restless urgings of “Where shall we go? And what shall we do?” again became insistent, would not down, and demanded of him a new answer. In his introduction to Look Homeward, Angel, Maxwell Perkins quoted a passage from War and Peace that Wolfe loved: “Prince Andrei looked up at the stars and sighed; everything was so different from what he thought it was going to be.” This was a theme for the young Thomas Wolfe, who came to earth trailing clouds of glory, who retained them in his mind but [...] Read More »
The Notion of the Book
The idea for A Journey Through Literary America came to me in January of 2008 in Kawasaki, Japan (near Tokyo), where I was visiting my wife’s family. On the plane on the way over, I had devoured American Pastoral by Philip Roth. The book is narrated by one of Roth’s literary alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman, but it mostly concerns itself with the life of someone he grew up worshiping: one of the greatest athletes that Zuckerman’s Jewish Newark neighborhood of Weequahic had ever known: “Swede” Levov. So named because he looked so Swedish rather than Jewish, the Swede had married a Miss New Jersey (Catholic, much to the horror of his parents) and waved goodbye to a promising baseball career in order to take over his father’s glove factory in Newark. Weequahic is not only Nathan Zuckerman’s stomping ground but also the neighborhood where Philip Roth grew up. One might use the term “predominantly Jewish” nowadays for how it was, in order to be respectful of other races that might have lived there, but back then I am sure it was known simply as the Jewish neighborhood. That is, solidly, squarely, any way you slice it—like a Snickers bar is packed [...] Read More »
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