A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

The World Is Your Playground
by Matt Sutherland

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.

If you’re a reader, and you’re tuned into the sense of place that is critical to the work of many great writers, this handsome book is for you. The photographs capture the essence of the places that inspired 26 American writers, from Thoreau to Steinbeck to Faulkner to Proulx to Dove. The text is readable, to-the-point, thoughtful and economical, with the photographs providing the perfect amplification.

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 shape those authors’ writing. The subjects of her gorgeous, mood-evoking shots range from Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia farm, Andalusia, to the fields that inspired Robert Frost (the only Vermont author featured), to the rocky Pacific coastline where Robinson Jeffers built Tor House out of stone.

Um, Robinson Jeffers? The 1920s poet, whose work was profoundly shaped by place, “was once one of the most famous poets in America. Then his work fell by the wayside,” Hummel explains by phone from the printing house where he works in Marina del Rey, and which also printed his book. Including Jeffers “was an attempt to bring him back into the American canon, in my own small way,” he adds with a laugh.

Other choices are more obvious: Hawthorne and New England, E. Annie Proulx and Wyoming. Hemingway is included for his connections not to Paris or Spain but to Walloon Lake, Mich. On the other hand, Emily Dickinson did not make the cut, Hummel recalls, because “hers is not really location-based writing.”

A Journey Through Literary America is not a guide to literary landmarks. (The book doesn’t clarify, for instance, that Emerson lived at the Old Manse in Concord, Mass., for only a year, in 1834, while Hawthorne’s family moved in later, in 1842, and stayed for three years.) “We were investigating the locales that inspired great American writers, as opposed to the spots where they laid their heads,” Hummel says. ?

His essays on these locales and their immortalizers blend historical details — such as moments in war or politics that predate an author’s arrival, or trends in art history that helped shape an authorial viewpoint — with a sense of each writer as a person. Emerson wooed his second wife, Lidia, by letter, then “rechristened [her] as the more poetic ‘Lidian.’” Faulkner and Hemingway, who both “wanted desperately to be heroes in the Great War,” “each saw a good tailor and returned [from noncombat roles] resplendent in a uniform that was better than standard issue.”

If the book’s arresting photographs threaten to upstage its text, that’s only fitting: Hummel originally “figured the photographs were the key thing, and I’d write short little blurbs about each writer. But when I started reading the authors, I realized you had to do them justice,” he says.

He hopes the book inspires others to read American fiction — and possibly become writers themselves. Readers are invited to compose their own place-based recollections for the My Hometown Writing Contest, to be judged by Hummel, his editor, Malena Watrous, and his sister, Maria Hummel, a novelist and former Bread Loaf fellow who teaches writing at Stanford University. “There’s a lot that anybody can say about the place where they grew up, and there should be a venue for that,” says Hummel, a nascent writer himself. “And, who knows, there might be another book in that, too.”

Original: http://www.7dvt.com/2009former-vermonter-creates-american-literary-journey

LITERARY MAGAZINES & PUBLISHING, ALTERNATIVE MEDIA, LINKS TO GOOD READING

Still looking for a holiday gift for that literary person on your list? A Journey Through Literary America is a collaborative work by writer Thomas R. Hummel and photographer Tamra L. Dempsey. The publisher’s site describes the book: “This 304 page coffee table book takes a look at 26 of America’s great authors and the places that inspired them. Unique to this book of literary biography is the element of the photograph. With over 140 photographs throughout, the images add mood and dimension to the writing – and they are often shockingly close to what the featured authors described in their own words.”

It is indeed a gorgeous book. Neither the text nor photos dominate, but work well in harmony to create a book that can be browsed for its images or curled up with and delved into for its writing. The content on the featured authors provides commentary about their lives in the places where they lived. Even if you already know the background of these authors, seeing them recounted here in context with the photographs adds a new, warmer sense of story to their lives. The information looks both at the authors’ lives past as well as how they continue to be recognized within the community in which they lived, and in some cases, in which their characters lived.

Additionally, the authors are running a writing contest on the theme My Hometown: “We want you to write about your hometown (we leave it up to you how you choose to define the term, whether it be the town your grew up in, the town you have adopted as your own, the place that feels most like ‘home.’) The most important thing is that your entry must strongly evoke place.” Deadline August 1, 2010.

Original: http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/journey-through-literary-america.html

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.