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.

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

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

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.

What a very beautiful and evocative book! I am pleased — and honored — to be a part of it.

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

I’ll start this review by admitting that I’m not the easiest guy in the world to shop for, and I really do feel bad for all of the people in my life who have to buy me gifts whenever my birthday or Christmas rolls around. The problem, if you can call it that, is that I’m just not into things. I am, however, a book lover, but this also raises a number of issues in the gift-giving arena–the biggest of which is that nobody (including myself half the time) knows which books I own or have read, and so nobody knows which books to give me. And, yes, there are always gift cards to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but these gifts, heartfelt and sincere though they may be, smack slightly of defeat. They say, “I wanted to get you something, but I didn’t know what, so I’ll let you figure it out for yourself.”

I say all of this because I’m sure I’m not the only person out there who’s hard to buy for. And I further suspect that all of these people who are, like me, hard to buy for have people who love them and who want to buy them something out of the ordinary whenever gift-giving season rolls around. But they (the people who love the people who are hard to buy for) can never find the right gift and will–at the last moment, when all hope is lost–always settle for giving yet another gift card each holiday season even though they’d much prefer to buy a gift from the heart that say, “Hey! I care about you, and I know you well enough to get you this wonderful gift!” To put it bluntly, I’m saying all of this because I know how hard it is to shop for book lovers. But no more–for A Journey Through Literary America by Thomas R. Hummel and Tamra L. Dempsey is, I daresay, the perfect gift for book lovers.

First, the book is, objectively speaking, aesthetically beautiful. Illustrated with page after glossy page of vibrant photographs, it explores the settings that inspired many of America’s most loved authors–from Washington Irving’s Castkills to Robinson Jeffers’ Big Sur and back to Toni Morrison’s Lorain, Ohio (and many, many other places in between). Yet the book is more than just a collection of pretty (or, more accurately, stunning) pictures. And it’s even more than just an examination of the specific places that had a profound effect on the literary output of certain authors. Rather, it’s a meditation on relationship between place and author, or, even more broadly, upon place and self, place and identity. This is no small feat, for it takes the authors we admire in the abstract and places them squarely in the real world. Seeing their homes, seeing their towns, seeing the streets they walked and the rolling vistas that inspired them makes the 26 authors examined in A Journey all the more real to me, all the more human.

Needless to say, this volume is both a treat and treasure. Informative as it is beautiful, it will make a wonderful addition to any library. And, if you’re looking for the perfect gift for the book lover in your life, look no further than A Journey Through Literary America.

Original: http://smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/a-journey-through-literary-america/

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 a photo essay on the places authors wrote about, accompanied by the words they used to write about them?’”

A phone call to Dempsey later, and a mere essay quickly evolved into a list of 50 favorite American authors, which was then scaled back to a more feasible group of 26 who “all had something to say about America,” explained Hummel.

Hummel spent the better part of a year flying all over the country on the weekends, researching writers and their hometowns for his own contributions to the text, and compiling a short list for Dempsey.

Armed with only a Canon D5 and a black lab named Sherpa, Dempsey then set out on the road with her fiancee in an Airstream Interstate. For three months they explored America, starting in Santa Barbara and making a clockwise journey up to Washington, across the Midwest, up into New England, down the East Coast, and to Georgia, then through Mississippi, Nebraska, and Colorado.

“We were traveling constantly, and had maybe 24 to 48 hours, at most, in each location,” said Dempsey. “We just showed up; we didn’t set anything up in advance. We shot with available light under all sorts of conditions.”

Dempsey’s interest in the project came, in part, from her father, who “always had a huge appreciation for America,” she said. “When we were kids he took us out of school for six or eight months and we traveled, visiting all but three states. We really learned a lot, traveling that way.”

And though Dempsey and Hummel experienced America separately, they still shared the experience. “You feel the same thing that inspired the writers,” explained Hummel.

One example of this commonality centers on a photograph Dempsey took in Sherwood Anderson’s hometown of Clyde, Ohio. “There’s a scene in Winesburg, Ohio where George Willard goes for a walk at night. He walks by a picket fence and stops underneath a streetlight, and I told Tamra that I wanted that shot,” said Hummel. She got the shot – a beautiful, dark photograph overlaid with Anderson’s famous words.

And though we Americans continually try to define our namesake, our patriotism, our ideals, and ourselves, Dempsey may have already pinpointed what makes us distinctly American: “I found that most of these authors had a real appreciation for their hometown. What they wrote about well was what they knew. We’re always searching for something different to explore, when most of the time it’s right where we already are.”

Original: http://www.independent.com/news/2009/oct/09/americas-places-literature/

Elegantly illustrated and written from a unique historical perspective, A Journey Through Literary America reacquaints the reader with the writers who established and continued our literary tradition. Beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, the meticulously chosen photographs not only capture the natural wonders that have dazzled and influenced American writers for three centuries but also offer insight into the settings in which they lived and wrote. A beautiful and necessary book.

— Elaine Kendall

An author, journalist and playwright, Elaine Kendall has written four books of social history: The Upper Hand, an irreverent account of changing male/female roles; The Happy Mediocrity, an examination of American choices in architecture, food, clothing, manners and mores as they have developed over the centuries; Peculiar Institutions, an informal account of the development of women’s education from pre-revolutionary times to the present, and Seeing Europe Again: Confessions of a First World Traveler; a light-hearted comparison of European and American cultural attitudes.

Her articles about art, theater, travel and various aspects of the changing American scene have appeared in Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, Performing Arts, Horizon, American Heritage, Vogue, The Dramatist, Playbill, and many other national magazines. From 1974 to 1997, she was a weekly book columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Elaine Kendall has also written and collaborated on libretti and lyrics for musical plays produced in New York, California, Hawaii and Connecticut. An American Cantata is an adaptation of the late John Sanford’s chronicle of American women, and is available from Samuel French, Inc. The Would-be Diva is a musical comedy based upon the extraordinary life of the Polish-born beauty Ganna Walska. Isadora is a musical drama about Isadora Duncan, and Kendall’s 2003 show is Cole & Will: Together Again, a unique revue melding Cole Porter’s memorable lyrics to appropriate moments from 15 Shakespearean dramas and comedies.

Elaine Kendall is a member of The Authors Guild, The Dramatists Guild, and ASCAP.

Reference quoted from: http://members.authorsguild.net/ekendall/