A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Willa Cather
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 »
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 »
Denver to Hastings, NE to Red Cloud, NE
East of Denver, more of the same. Interstate lanes, buttes and rises and hillocks smoothed by mighty earthmoving equipment to create the Eisenhower Interstate System, alongside which not a living soul is to be seen…Our TARP dollars at work in mile after mile of road repairs: white line painting, paving, inexplicable spraying of liquid on the shoulders, miles upon miles of orange striped road work barrels taller than my son with signs warning of increased fines in road work areas (trying to give some of that TARP money back?) Back in Denver at the Tattered Cover the booksellers gathered ’round the book, admiring it. The Tattered Cover, another died and gone to bookstore heaven experience, a different heavenk, this one in a former opera house or theather…immense…with comfortable chairs, the barnes and noble experience of pleasanty seating but un-canned, the furrniture not something you would find at the Holiday Inn Express…W.P. Kinsella, Annie Leibovitz looking dramatic, Al Gore looking not, Nick Bantock, Opalonga Pugh, Bobbie Ann Mason looking like a Bobbie Ann (with all due respect), Amy Tan, Kazuo Ishiguro looking like his prose, George Plimpton looking like a living icon (may he rest in peace), Susan Minot with flashes [...] 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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