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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©2010 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

I was grateful to Lady Bird Johnson that she had the foresight to pack things away whenever she did updating of the house, so that it could be returned to the look it had when LBJ was there. All that 1960′s aqua-green Naugahyde! LBJ had a wall of three TV sets in his office, a reminder that you could get all the news on just three channels in his time.

I also loved the typical LBJ stories. In the garage, beside the impressive Presidential cars, was a little funny-looking car, like a Nash Rambler, if you’re old enough to remember them. He would load it up with guests, and drive it toward the river and start yelling that the brakes were failing and they were going into the water. Okay. It was an amphibious automobile, quite comfortable floating in the Pedernales.

And how Lady Bird and LBJ lived together all those years is a mystery. She had refined tastes, and liked to decorate in country casual, but with polished furniture and nice pieces of art.  She got a beautiful dining room set with chairs carefully matched to the table. However, one day, LBJ dragged one of his overstuffed leather cowboy chairs in to the head of the table. There it stayed beside the telephone that was attached to the table in case he got a call during dinner. Both totally out of place in the lady-like decor.

He had nearly 70 phones installed around the ranch so he would never miss a call. Wouldn’t he have been in heaven with a Blackberry!

I used to wrinkle my nose at his down-home paeans to Texas hill country and his beloved Pedernales. But by golly, standing there on the lawn of the Western White House and looking past the bluebonnets  and across the road, through the live oak trees  at the narrow strip of muddy water across the road, I could totally understand why he spent more than 1/3 of his Presidency in this lovely spot.

The humble childhood home seemed similar to the white clapboard homes in small town Ohio where I grew up, although this was a generation older and I never actually had to put up with an outhouse. The most striking thing about that small house was learning that his mother taught elocution to the town children on the front porch after regular school. Her love of literature and poetry and public speaking fills in a gap in my knowledge about LBJ.

The homes and the surroundings go farther in explaining the President than any biography could ever do.

Have you visited LBJ’s home or other President’s homes? What do you get out of the experience?

Other slide shows of Texas: San Antonio on My Mind, and the Art and Food of San Antonio.

A favorite Texas Writer, Larry McMurtry

Disclaimer: I went there on a press trip as the guest of the Fredericksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau.

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library

©2010 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library

©2010 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.