America's Writers

Much of our nation's history is told not through its fact but through its fiction & poetry. Creative works can counterbalance the timeline of facts & figures, wars and financial panics, politicians and generals, to reflect what happened in history as well as how people felt and reacted to the events and the times.

Below is a list of the titles for dicussion. Come to one meeting or come to them all!

September 22, 2008

Hawthorne: A Life, by Brenda Wineapple. Knopf, 2003.
Born into an old, pre-Revolutionary War New England family (a great-grandfather condemned innocent women to hang as witches), Nathaniel Hawthorne was schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College, took part in the attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then satirized it in his writings (Blithesdale Romance). He was a friend to Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, but unlike them made fun of Abraham Lincoln and opposed Abolition. He was a staunch Democrat and close friend of one of America's worst presidents, Franklin Pierce. He wrote compellingly and compassionately of women, yet believed they should not themselves be writers. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers around New England and many feature moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. Wineaaple present Hawthorne as a man consumed by guilt (he born Nathaniel Hathorne but changed his name to dissociate himself from relatives including the aforementioned witch-condemning judge) whose themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity.

October 27, 2008

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, by Joan D. Hedrick. Oxford, 1994.
"Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject....But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential American novels ever written, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, the work caused such a stir that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!" Hedrick presents an engaging and informative book that brings to life not just the complex and fascinating woman and writer but also the 19th-century America that shaped her and was shaped by her.

November 24, 2008

Melville: A Biography, by Laurie Robertson-Lorant. Potter, 1995.
Melville was born in New York City into an established (one of his grandfather's had taken part in the Boston Tea Party) merchant family. After his father's life ended in disaster when Melville was 12, he went to sea as a cabin boy. He would travel the world before settling again in the US in his mid-20s. Inspired by Hawthorne's achievements with the pen, he turned to writing, calling upon experiences as a common sailor to tackle the complex, spiritual questions of his time. Thus, his novels represent the social consciousness of 19th-century America but his epic allegorical works like Moby Dick were neither popular nor critical successes. He died forgotten by his contemporaries. Only in 1924, a generation after his death, did the publication of his unfinished late masterpiece, Billy Budd, launch his reputation..

December 22, 2008

Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, by Jerome Loving. Univ. of CA, 1999.
Teacher, printer, politician, journalist, revolutionary poet, Civil War nurse, public relations pioneer, and literary guru, Long Island-born Walt Whitman is recognized as one of America's greatest poets. This authoritative biography affords fresh, often revelatory insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America and the issue of race, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, and his insistence on the union of American states. His moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed during the Civil War, the battlegrounds and camps he visited demonstrated why the war became one of the defining events of his life and poetry. He wrote, as both poet and journalist, of the atrocities of the war of brother against brother. Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti-war poets like Adrienne Rich. Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (Whitman was the model for the title character), with whom he corresponded until his death.

January 26, 2009

My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, by Alfred Habegger. RH, 2001..
Among the ranks of other such acclaimed poets as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and hart Crane, Emily Dickinson is considered one of the most original 19th Century American poets. For the first time, readers share fully in the private struggle through which Dickinson learned how to transform emotional trauma into art. Kept close to home in Amherst, Mass., by her authoritarian father who regarded women as intellectually inferior to men, she chose to become a recluse (most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence) and avoid altogether the social duties laid on middle-class women. She questioned the puritanical background of her Calvinist family and explored her own spirituality often in poignant, deeply personal poetry. Although many friends had encouraged Dickinson to publish her poetry, only a handful of them appeared publicly during her lifetime. It was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Dickinson's poetry reflects her loneliness but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational, life-giving moments and suggest the possibility of happiness.

February 23, 2009

Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father , by John Matteson. Norton, 2007.
Bronson Alcott was a teacher, lecturer, idealist and friend of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. His daughter, Louisa, was w illful and exuberant and defied all her father's theories of child rearing. She could not understand the frugal life of self-denial and spiritual striving Bronson preached, which reached its epitome in the failed utopian community of Fruitlands (Louisa eventually supported her destitute family through her writing). At the same time, like most daughters, she wanted her father's approval. Matteson tells the story of their tense yet loving relationship between two exceptional Americans and abolitionists: one a man of quixotic dreams and abject failures; the other a resourceful, self-sacrificing, and revolutionary woman writer.

March 23, 2009

Mark Twain, by Ron Powers. Free Press, 2005.
'I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."' Humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer, Mark Twain founded the American voice becoming the representative figure of his times as the country ended one century and commenced another. His works are a living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. Born Samiel Clemens, he left his frontier boyhood in Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats (his pseudonym, Mark Twain, comes from these days as a river pilot) When the Civil War adversely impacted the river boat trade, he embarked on career as newspaper reporter in the Wild West. He gained fame as a humorist, travel writer, and lecturer. He coined the term "the Gilded Age." He became the toast of Europe and a celebrity who toured the globe. Twain hobnobbed with the most ruthless of robber barons and ruined himself by pursuing their kind of obscene wealth, although he held public anti-capitalist views. He was twice vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States, was critical of organzied religion, and while remaining "neutral" during the Civil War, supported both abolition and emancipation.

April 27, 2009

Edith Wharton, by Lee Hermione. Knopf, 2007.
Born in 1862, Wharton is generally thought of as the grand dame of American letters. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton was born into a world of wealth and priviledge. She entered into a high society marriage (the childless union ended in divorce), which became the milieu for her writings and she became one of its most astute critics. A familiar theme of Wharton’s works is the conflict between societal mores & the pursuit of happiness. During the First World War she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, and, in 1916, was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. Wharton surrounded herself with the most gifted intellectuals of her time. Teddy Roosevelt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway were all guests of hers at one time or another. Another facet of Edith's career was her friendship with Henry James whose influence on her writing is inestimable.

May 26, 2009

One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, by Jay Parini. HarCol, 2004.
One of the most important writers of the 20th century (he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature), William Faulkner not only wrote novels, but novellas, short stories, poetry, and even screenplays (The Big Sleep; To Have and Have Not). Born in Mississippi in 1897, Faulkner spent most of his life there and much of his writings were influences by the history and culture of the South. After being rejected from the army because he was too short, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and served with the RAF in World War I, but did not see any action (this did not stop him from telling people that he was shot down in France). Jay Parini paints an intimate picture of Faulkner's Mississippi world and shows how the artist transformed this raw material into Yoknapatawpha County, a place of pure imagination. Parini offers a portrait of a man always trying to invent a new mask for himself as well as the portrait of an artist consumed by a desire to tell about the South and its class struggles, its depravity, and its captivity to the double bonds of land and history.

June 22, 2009

Flannery O'Connor: A Life, by Jean W. Cash. Univ. of TN, 2002.
Along with authors like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its people ("anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader," she once said, "unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic"). O'Connor's body of work is small--consisting of only 31 stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters. Intensely private, O'Connor was a product of her southern upbringing and her deep spiritual commitment to her Roman Catholic faith and her groundbreaking narratives touched on a variety of racial and religious themes. In 1950 O'Connor suffered her first attack from lupus, a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. Until her death, she lived with her mother on her dairy farm where, In spite of the illness, she continued to write and occasionally she lectured about creative writing in colleges.

Titles chosen by Brad Silverman

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