A New Literary History of America

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along - a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, "A New Literary History of America" brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric - cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T.J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, and new. In snapshots of a few thousand words each, the entries in A New Literary History put on display the exploring, tinkering and risk-taking that have contributed to the invention of America...A New Literary History of America gives us what amounts to a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear. What you see isn't the past so much as the present. -- Wes Davis Wall Street Journal 20090926 A New Literary History of America is not your typical Harvard University Press anthology...[It] roams far beyond any standard definition of literature. Aside from compositions that contain the written word, its subjects include war memorials, jazz, museums, comic strips, film, radio, musicals, skyscrapers, cybernetics and photography. -- Patricia Cohen New York Times 20090922 This magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture...Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too...This book is not so much a history of our literature as it is a literary version of our history, told through the culture we've created to recount our past and conjure our future...In the age of Wikipedia, a reference book like this needs more than just the facts; it needs to tell us what the facts mean, and A New Literary History does just that. -- Laura Miller Salon 20090922 Ambitious, thought-provoking, and comprehensive, A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, features more than 200 essays on poems, letters, novels, memoirs, speeches, movies, and theater, by writers ranging from Bharati Mukherjee to John Edgar Wideman, reinterpreting the American experience form the 1500s forward. Elle 20091001 The huge, welcoming, exciting, just-published volume A New Literary History of America is a book with which to spend entire days and the rest of your life...Where else are you going to read Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer, and Walter Mosley on the hardboiled detective novel? Don't you want to do that right now?...Talk about an all-American value: You could read this 1,000-plus-page book forever and never use up its revelations and its pleasures. -- Ken Tucker Entertainment Weekly online 20090923 [This] represents a rethinking of the awkward genre of literary history, which can fall disappointingly between the cracks of straight criticism and narrative history, devolving into a dull recitation of author bios and conventional literary wisdom. With the help of an editorial board, Marcus and Sollors settled on 216 artworks (film and painting as well as texts), authors, movements, and cultural artifacts that help answer the question, "What is America?" Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, and Faulkner are in there, to be sure, but so are the Winchester rifle, "Steamboat Willie," Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven," Alcoholics Anonymous, and Linda Lovelace (the star of the pornographic film "Deep Throat," who later said she'd been raped during its filming)...It will be a welcome change if a "literary history," for once, stirs up a little dust. -- Christopher Shea Boston Globe Brainiac blog 20090826 [An] essential, eclectic doorstop anthology. New York Magazine 20090913 The full national-literary character of the United States is on display in this mighty history and reference work for our time. Written by a distinguished team, under the sure-handed editorship of musicologist and historian Marcus and Sollors...this volume begins with America's first appearance on a map and concludes with the election of President Obama. Among the more than 200 contributors are Bharati Mukherjee (on The Scarlet Letter), Camille Paglia (on Tennessee Williams) and Ishmael Reed (on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)...This is an astounding achievement in multiculturalism and American studies, which in the age of Google and the Internet lights the way toward serious interpretive reference publishing. (Starred Review) Publishers Weekly Of course it's hefty; it's a "broadly cultural history" of America with a literary bent, an avid and provocative collaboration that tracks the American story not only through works of American literature, classic and forgotten, but also via music, art, pop culture, speeches, letters, religious tracts, photographs, and Supreme Court decisions. Versatile social critic and historian Marcus, Harvard University professor of English and African American studies Sollors, and their illustrious board of editors assembled more than 200 commissioned essays, which meander chronologically from 1507 and the first appearance on a map of the name "America" to Barack Obama's election. In between is a dazzling array of inquiries into Gone with the Wind and Invisible Man, The Wizard of Oz and the blues, hard-boiled detective stories and Mickey Mouse, "Howl" and Miles Davis, nature writing and Zora Neale Hurston. With such contributors as Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Gaitskill, Bharati Mukherjee, Richard Powers, Ishmael Reed, David Thomson, David Treuer, and John Edgar Wideman, this is an adventurous, jazzily choral, and kaleidoscopic book of interpretations, illuminations, and revitalized history. -- Donna Seaman Booklist 20090901 Marcus and Sollors trace through literature the dynamism of American society and culture spanning 500 years, from the first time the name America appears on a map (1507) to the election of Barack Obama as president...No single volume can fully capture the range of a nation's literary history, but this book succeeds in highlighting new ideas and providing a starting point for further investigation. Above all, it is a pleasure to read. -- Mark Alan Williams Library Journal 20090815 Reading this gorgeous compendium on the written word in America should be required for gaining or maintaining U.S. citizenship. And even at more than 1,000 pages, it's a fun way to learn what we're all about...The list of contributors is a rich, varied array of our best contemporary writers and cultural mavens...The editors were aiming for "a reexamination of the American experienc* Introduction [Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors] *1507: The name "America" appears on a map [Toby Lester] *1521, August 13: Mexico in America [Kirsten Silva Gruesz] *1536, July 24: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca [Ilan Stavans] *1585: "Counterfeited according to the truth" [Michael Gaudio] *1607: Fear and love in the Virginia colony [Adam Goodheart] *1630: A city upon a hill [Elizabeth Winthrop] *1643: A nearer neighbor to the Indians [Ted Widmer] *1666, July 10: Anne Bradstreet [Wai Chee Dimock] *1670: The American jeremiad [Emory Elliott] *1670: The stamp of God's image [Jason D. LaFountain] *1673: The Jesuit relations [Laurent Dubois] *1683: Francis Daniel Pastorius [Alfred L. Brophy] *1692: The Salem witchcraft trials [Susan Castillo] *1693--1694, March 4: Edward Taylor [Werner Sollors] *1700: Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph [David Blight] *1722: Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters [Joyce E. Chaplin] *1740: The Great Awakening [Joanne van der Woude] * Late 1740s; 1814, September 13--14: Two national anthems [John Picker] *1765, December 23: Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur [Leo Damrosch] *1773, September: Phillis Wheatley [Rafia Zafar] *1776: The Declaration of Independence [Frank Kelleter] *1784, June: Charles Willson Peale [Michael Leja] *1787: James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention [Mitchell Meltzer] *1787--1790: John Adams, Discourses on Davila [John Diggins] *1791: Philip Freneau and The National Gazette [Jeffrey L. Pasley] *1796: Washington's farewell address [Francois Furstenberg] *1798: Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts [Nancy Armstrong] *1798: American gothic [Marc Amfreville] *1801, March 4: Jefferson's first inaugural address [Jan Ellen Lewis] *1804, January: The matter of Haiti [Kaiama Glover] *1809: Cupola of the world [Judith Richardson] *1819, February: The Missouri crisis [John Stauffer] *1820, November 27: Landscape with birds [Christoph Irmscher] *1821: Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary [Lisa Brooks] *1821, June 30: Junius Brutus Booth [Coppelia Kahn] *1822: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow's Hiawatha [David Treuer] *1825, November: Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school [Alan Wallach] *1826, July 4: Songs of the republic [Steve Erickson] *1826: Cooper's Leatherstocking tales [Richard Hutson] *1826; 1927: Transnational poetry [Stephen Burt] *1827: Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon [Terryl L. Givens] *1828: David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles [Tommie Shelby] *1830, May 21: Jump Jim Crow [W.T. Lhamon, Jr.] *1831, March 5: The Cherokee Nation decision [Philip Deloria] *1832, July 10: President Jackson's bank veto [Dan Feller] *1835, January: Democracy in America [Ted Widmer] *1835: William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee [Jeffrey Johnson] *1835: The Sacred Harp [Sean Wilentz] *1836, February 23--March 6: The Alamo and Texas border writing [Norma E. Cantu] *1836, February 28: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. [Kirsten Silva Gruesz] *1837, August 15: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" [James Conant] *1838, July 15: "The Divinity School Address" [Herwig Friedl] *1838, September 3: The slave narrative [Caille Millner] *1841: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" [Robert Clark] *1846, June: James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers [Shelley Streeby] *1846, late July: Henry David Thoreau [Jonathan Arac] *1850: The Scarlet Letter [Bharati Mukherjee] *1850, July 19: Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement [Lawrence Buell] *1850, August 5: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville [Clark Blaise] *1851: Moby-Dick [Greil Marcus] *1851: Uncle Tom's Cabin [Beverly Lowry] *1852: Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and utopian communities [Winfried Fluck] *1852, July 5: Frederick Douglass, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" [Liam Kennedy] *1854: Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction [Cindy Weinstein] *1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [Angus Fletcher] *1858: The Lincoln--Douglas debates [Michael T. Gilmore] *1859: The science of the Indian [Scott Richard Lyons] *1861: Emily Dickinson [Susan Stewart] *1862, December 13: The journeys of Little Women [Shirley Samuels] *1865, March 4: Lincoln's second inaugural address [Ted Widmer] *1865: "Conditions of repose" [Robin Kelsey] *1869, March 4: Carl Schurz [Michael Boyden] *1872, November 5: All men and women are created equal [Laura Wexler] *1875: The Winchester Rifle [Merritt Roe Smith] *1876, January 6: Melville in the dark [Kenneth W. Warren] *1876, March 10: The art of telephony [Avital Ronell] *1878: "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" [Christopher Hookway] *1879: John Muir and nature writing [Scott Slovic] *1881, January 24: Henry James, Portrait of a Lady [Alide Cagidemetrio] *1884: Mark Twain's hairball [Ishmael Reed] *1884, July: The Linotype machine [Lisa Gitelman] *1884, November: The Southwest imagined [Leah Dilworth] *1885: The problem of error [James Conant] *1885, July: Limits to violence [James Dawes] *1885, October: Writing New Orleans [Andrei Codrescu] *1888: The introduction of motion pictures [Jonathan Lethem] *1889, August 28: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [Yael Schacher] *1893: Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature [David Treuer] *1895: Ida B. Wells, A Red Record [Jacqueline Goldsby] *1896: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life [Judith Jackson Fossett] *1896, September 6: Queen Lili'uokalani [Rob Wilson] *1897, Memorial Day: The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument [Richard Powers] *1898, June 22: Literature and imperialism [Amy Kaplan] *1899; 1924: McTeague and Greed [Gilberto Perez] *1900: Henry Adams [T.J. Jackson Lears] *1900: The Wizard of Oz [Gerald Early] *1900; 1905: Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth [Farah Jasmine Griffin] *1901: Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition [John Edgar Wideman] *1901; 1903: The problem of the color line [Arnold Rampersad] *1903, May 5: "The real American has not yet arrived" [Aviva Taubenfeld] *1903: The invention of the blues [Luc Sante] *1903: One sees what one sees [Daniel Albright] *1904, August 30: Henry James in America [Ross Posnock] *1905, October 15: Little Nemo in Slumberland [Kerry Roeder] *1906, April 9: The Azusa Street revival [RJ Smith] *1906, April 18, 5:14 a.m.: The San Francisco Earthquake [Kathleen Moran] *1911: "Alexander's Ragtime Band" [Philip Furia] *1912, April 15: Lifeboats cut adrift [Alan Ackerman] *1912: The lure of impossible things [Heather Love] *1912: Tarzan begins his reign [Gerald Early] *1913: A modernist moment [Bonnie Costello] *1915: D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation [Richard Schickel] *1915: Robert Frost [Christian Wiman] *1917: The philosopher and the millionaire [Richard J. Bernstein] *1920, August 10: Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" [Daphne A. Brooks] *1921: Jean Toomer [Elizabeth Alexander] *1922: T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence [Anita Patterson] *1923, October: Chaplinesque [David Thomson] *1924: F.O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney [Robert Polito] *1924, May 26: The Johnson--Reed Act and ethnic literature [Yael Schacher] *1925: The Great Gatsby [Lan Tran] *1925, June: Sinclair Lewis [Jeffrey Ferguson] *1925, July: The Scopes trial [Michael Kazin] *1925, August 16: Dorothy Parker [Catherine Keyser] *1926: Fire!! [Carla Kaplan] *1926: Hardboiled [Walter Mosley] *1926: The Book-of-the-Month Club [Joan Shelley Rubin] *1927: Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag [Paul Muldoon] *1927, May 16: "Free to develop their faculties" [Jeffrey Rosen] *1928, April 8, Easter Sunday: Dilsey Gibson goes to church [Werner Sollors] *1928, Summer: John Dos Passos [Phoebe Kosman] *1928, November 18: The mouse that whistled [Karal Ann Marling] *1930: "You're swell!" [Robert Gottlieb] *1930, March: The Silent Enemy [Micah Treuer] *1930, October: Grant Wood's American Gothic [Sarah Vowell] *1931, March 19: Nevada legalizes gambling [David Thomson] *1932: Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters [Anthony Grafton] *1932: Arthur Miller [Andrea Most] *1932, April or May: The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty [John M. Staudenmaier, S.J.] *1932, Christmas: Ned Cobb [Robert Cantwell] *1933: Baby Face is censored [Stephanie Zacharek] *1933, March: FDR's first Fireside Chat [Paula Rabinowitz] *1934, September: Robert Penn Warren [Howell Raines] *1935: The Popular Front [Angela Miller] *1935: The skyscraper [Sarah Whiting] *1935, June 10: Alcoholics Anonymous [Michael Tolkin] *1935, October 10: Porgy and Bess [John Rockwell] *1936: Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom! [Carolyn Porter] *1936, July 5: Two days in Harlem [Adam Bradley] *1936, November 23: Life begins [Michael Lesy] *1938: Superman [Douglas Wolk] *1938, May: Jelly Roll Morton speaks [Marybeth Hamilton] *1939: Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" Robert O'Meally *1939; 1981: Up from invisibility [Josef Jarab] *1940: "No way like the American way" [Erika Doss] *1940--1944: Preston Sturges [Douglas McGrath] *1941: An insolent style [Carrie Tirado Bramen] *1941: Citizen Kane [Joseph McBride] *1941: The word "multicultural" [Werner Sollors] *1943: Hemingway's paradise, Hemingway's prose [Keith Taylor] *1944: The second Bill of Rights [Cass R. Sunstein] *1945, February: Bebop [Ingrid Monson] *1945, April 11: Thomas Pynchon and modern war [Glenda Carpio] *1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m.: The atom bomb [Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi] *1946, December 5: Integrating the military [Gerald Early] *1947, December 3: Tennessee Williams [Camille Paglia] *1948: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics [David A. Mindell] *1948: Saul Bellow [Ruth Wisse] *1949--1950: "The Birth of the Cool" [Ted Gioia] *1950, November 28: "Damned busy painting" [T.J. Clark] *1951: A poet among painters [Mark Ford] *1951: The Catcher in the Rye [Gish Jen] *1951: James Jones, From Here to Eternity [Lindsay Waters] *1951: A soft voice [M. Lynn Weiss] *1952, April 12: Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood [Michael Ventura] *1952, June 10: C.L.R. James [Donald E. Pease] *1953, January 1: The song in country music [Dave Hickey] *1954: Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems [Helen Vendler] *1955, August 11: "The self-respect of my people" [Monica L. Miller] *1955, September 21: A.J. Liebling and the Marciano--Moore fight [Carlo Rotella] *1955, October 7: A generation in miniature [Richard Candida Smith] *1955, December: Nabokov's Lolita [Stephen Schiff] *1956, April 16: "Roll Over Beethoven" [James Miller] *1957: Dr. Seuss [Philip Nel] *1959: "Nobody's perfect" [William J. Mann] *1960: Psycho [William Beard] *1960, January: More than a game [Michael MacCambridge] *1961, January 20: JFK's inaugural address and Catch-22 [Charles Taylor] *1961, July 2: The author as advertisement [David Thomson] *1962: Bob Dylan writes "Song to Woody" [Joshua Clover] *1962: "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" [Howard Hampton] *1963, April: "Letter from Birmingham Jail" [George Hutchinson] *1964: Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead" [Peter Sacks] *1964, October 27: "The last stand on Earth" [Gary Kamiya] *1965, September 11: The Council on Interracial Books for Children [Dianne Johnson] *1965, October: The Autobiography of Malcolm X [David Bradley] *1968: Norman Mailer [Mary Gaitskill] *1968, March: The illusory babels of language [Hal Foster] *1968, August 28: The plight of conservative literature [Michael Kimmage] *1969: Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems [Laura Quinney] *1969, January 11: The first Asian Americans [Hua Hsu] *1969, November 12: The eye of Vietnam [Thi Phuong-Lan Bui] *1970: Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker [Cheryl A. Wall] *1970; 1972: Linda Lovelace [Ann Marlowe] *1973: Loisaida literature [Frances R. Aparicio] *1973: Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck [Maureen N. McLane] *1975: Gayl Jones [Robert O'Meally] *1981, March 31: Toni Morrison [Farah Jasmine Griffin] *1982: Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story [Sarah Shun-lien Bynum] *1982: Wild Style [Hua Hsu] *1982: Maya Lin's wall [Anne M. Wagner] *1982, November 8: Harriet Wilson [Saidiya V. Hartman] *1985, April 24: Henry Roth [Mario Materassi] *1987: Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey [Seo-Young Chu] *1995: Philip Roth [Hana Wirth-Nesher] *2001: Twenty-first-century free verse [Stephen Burt] *2003: Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing [Greil Marcus] *2005, August 29: Hurricane Katrina [Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors] *2008, November 4: Barack Obama [Kara Walker] * Contributors * Index