A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 »
Memory believes before knowing remembers. (Faulkner)
I am now reading a book I picked up many years ago called New Burlington. It caught my eye because I am from a Burlington—Burlington, Vermont. But this book was about New Burlington, Ohio, a town that has been soaking under the Caesar Creek Reservoir waters for over thirty years. The author, John Baskin, a reporter for a city paper, came to New Burlington in the early 1970’s, was told that it had been condemned for the purposes of making a reservoir, and decided to move in to record the town’s last year. “I have come to live in New Burlington’s last farm house, surrounded by white brick and clean silence. I have come here to understand its death, my life. Nothing is revealed.” New Burlington was like a lot of other villages. It had been settled by people pushing west. Its original buildings were solid mortise and tenon construction. Built so they wouldn’t blow down. There were town characters. And the stories of those characters were handed down from one generation to the next for edification and enjoyment. When New Burlington was settled, it was possible to walk from there to Chicago without ever leaving the forest. Electricity came [...] 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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