American novelist E.L. Doctorow once observed that literature
"endows places with meaning." Yet, as this wide-ranging new book
vividly illustrates, understanding the places that shaped American
writers' lives and their art can provide deep insight into what
makes their literature truly meaningful. Published on the eve of
the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation Act, Writing
America is a unique, passionate, and eclectic series of meditations
on literature and history, covering over 150 important National
Register historic sites, all pivotal to the stories that make up
America, from chapels to battlefields; from plantations to
immigration stations; and from theaters to internment camps. The
book considers not only the traditional sites for literary tourism,
such as Mark Twain's sumptuous Connecticut home and the peaceful
woods surrounding Walden Pond, but also locations that highlight
the diversity of American literature, from the New York tenements
that spawned Abraham Cahan's fiction to the Texas pump house that
irrigated the fields in which the farm workers central to Gloria
Anzaldua's poetry picked produce. Rather than just providing a
cursory overview of these authors' achievements, acclaimed literary
scholar and cultural historian Shelley Fisher Fishkin offers a deep
and personal reflection on how key sites bore witness to the
struggles of American writers and inspired their dreams. She probes
the global impact of American writers' innovative art and also
examines the distinctive contributions to American culture by
American writers who wrote in languages other than English,
including Yiddish, Chinese, and Spanish. Only a scholar with as
wide-ranging interests as Shelley Fisher Fishkin would dare to
bring together in one book writers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldua,
Nicholas Black Elk, David Bradley, Abraham Cahan, S. Alice
Callahan, Raymond Chandler, Frank Chin, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,
Countee Cullen, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jessie
Fauset, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg,
Jovita Gonzalez, Rolando Hinojosa, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, Lawson Fusao Inada, James Weldon Johnson, Erica Jong,
Maxine Hong Kingston, Irena Klepfisz, Nella Larsen, Emma Lazarus,
Sinclair Lewis, Genny Lim, Claude McKay, Herman Melville, N. Scott
Momaday, William Northup, John Okada, Mine Okubo, Simon Ortiz,
Americo Paredes, John P. Parker, Ann Petry, Tomas Rivera, Wendy
Rose, Morris Rosenfeld, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Yoshiko Uchida, Tino Villanueva,
Nathanael West, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Hisaye Yamamoto,
Anzia Yezierska, and Zitkala-Sa. Leading readers on an enticing
journey across the borders of physical places and imaginative
terrains, the book includes over 60 images, and extended excerpts
from a variety of literary works. Each chapter ends with resources
for further exploration. Writing America reveals the alchemy though
which American writers have transformed the world around them into
art, changing their world and ours in the process.
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