New Book Travels Across Literary America

Willa Cather's grasslands

Destination: United States of America

Book: A Journey Through Literary America by Thomas R. Hummel with photography by Tamra L. Dempsey

A Journey Through Literary America won me over right in the introduction, when Thomas R. Hummel talks about American’s urge to travel, that even de Toqueville recognized. “The American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man,” said that student of the early U. S.

But Hummel goes on to say that his own image of Los Angeles was shaped by reading Raymond Chandler.  Hummel and photographer Tamra Dempsey made a list of  “50 authors who wrote with a descriptive sense of place.”  Then cut some more. She drove a huge circle, illustrated on a map in the back of the book, which you can see as an interactive Google map at the Literary America website. The website also offers excerpts from the book and a WRITING CONTEST, open until August 31, 2010.

This gorgeous book takes a partly literal journey, but more an intellectual journey through space and time. The image-filled pages pay tribute to America’s literary greats.

Having to choose just a couple of dozen writers to represent this enormous land lays the authors open to complaints.  Here’s mine–Ohio without James Thurber? And even more disturbing, where’s Mark Twain?

But setting aside complaints arising about someone’s favorite form of literature or state totally passed over, the book serves up a big, beautiful feast of images and information.  And this is not just eye candy. The writing is scholarly without being stuffy. I mean you will learn things and see authors in new ways but you won’t feel like you have to re-read paragraphs to understand what is going on. The text combines biography and literary criticism with a strong sense of place. Author Hummel brings larger ideas to the table. Instead of a travelogue of the “this is where she lived” and “this is where he went to school” type, we get, under Steinbeck,

Ricketts’ lab was also a gathering spot for writers and thinkers, among them Henry Miller and Joseph Campbell…one of the scenes of the cross-pollination of writers and thinkers that took root in the American literary landscape.

I cannot emphasize enough how much the photography adds to this book. Tamra Dempsey proves that the most important equipment the photographer has is her own eye.  She has seen the precise landscapes and details that reflect the prose of the authors being discussed. It is even more impressive when you learn that she had 24 hours or less in some locations.

If you have never before been tempted to get on the road and follow the path of some of our the writers who put America on the map– writers like Robinson Jeffers in Big Sur, Emerson and Thoreau in New England, Steinbeck in California, Thomas Wolfe in North Carolina, Ernest Hemingway in Michigan, Richard Ford in New Jersey–you will be packing the picnic hamper and heading out for a road trip when you read this book.

Hummel and Dempsey have started a website saturated with every imaginable kind of literary event and temptation for literary travel. They call it Literary Destinations. Sometimes authors get it so right that all that is left to say is “Thank you.”

I have visited places tied to Emerson, Thoreau, Louise May Alcott, Thurber, Hemingway (in both Florida and Michigan), and probably some others that are slipping my mind. How about you? What Literary Journeys have you taken?

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Tags: BlogSherpa, Literary journey, literary travel, photography, USA