A New Literary History of America

Harvard University Press Reference Library

by Greil Marcus (Editor), Werner Sollors (Editor)

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, new.

Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information. "

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Essays, American History, Literary Criticism, Literature, Books About Books

1095 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 2009

About the author

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York. He lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent, exasperating, eccentric, vast, humming with a thousand voices, ten thousand whispery pages, and also, also a rack of 78s and 45s; this history takes the word LITERATURE and explodes it into a lot more’n ever it used to be so it’s not just the serene tramp tramp tramp of the great names going by duly saluted and festooned with praise, it’s also speeches, songs, paintings, and all that radio needs is a fuse and you can pound that dent out in the hood and everything’s a dollar in this box.

No, I did not read all 1050 large sized pages, there was a lot of the 18th century that I couldn’t get particularly riled up about but as soon as January 1804 came up it got pretty good, that was the Haitian revolution, then Audobon painting eagles and Stephen Foster and the Book of Mormon. There’s a whole ton of stuff about slavery (“what to the slave is the fourth of July?”), Jim Crow, narratives of escape, Ida Wells’ pamphlet called A Red Record describes three years of lynchings (1115 dead black men), the Klan rescue the South in The Birth of a Nation, and later, Malcolm X.

Many pages go by without a single essay celebrating a dead white male but Edgar Allen Poe does get to invent the detective story and Thoreau does refuse to pay his taxes and whatever it is that’s going on between Ishmael and Queequeg goes on all over again and Harriet Beecher Stowe starts the Civil War and death kindly stops for Emily Dickinson and Buffalo Bill proclaims that the Winchester is the boss for Indian fighting and Edison’s Kinetoscope invents a whole other kind of literature only a couple of years before Dorothy is whirled off to Oz.

There’s not a moment to relax. Gertrude Stein bamboozles, Little Nemo sets off for Slumberland, Tarzan makes that weird noise, there’s Gatsby, Babbitt, Scopes, there’s guys who never make passes at girls who wear glasses, Mickey Mouse, Alcoholics Anonymous (is that literature? It is now) and in 1945 there was this – can you guess what it is?

Magnificent, beautiful, stupendous… golden, purple, violet, gray and blue.

Whatever it was, it lit up the mountains

with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty… that poets dream about

Have you got it yet? Well, it’s the atom bomb, as witnessed in New Mexico by General Farrell.

And there’s music : the wild thrilling harmonies of the Sacred Harp, that mournful scraping of a knife against guitar strings overheard by W C Handy

I hate to see that evening sun go down
Makes me think I’m on my last go-round

And the big hit Alexander’s Ragtime Band (it wasn’t ragtime but no one was counting), and Mamie Smith is the first black woman on record (10th August 1920), Jelly Roll Morton mythologises himself for Alan Lomax, Billie Holiday records Strange Fruit, there’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in 1945 and Miles Davis, then Chuck Berry (never an easy guy to eulogise).

Now some of these article-writers lapse into High Mandarin, that supercilious tone used to cut out most mortals who don’t have a masters degree, and this is annoying. I could quote a couple of zingers but I won’t, I don’t wanna put you off. There are so many five to ten page articles here that you can just pass those fools right on by. There’ll be something intriguing just around the next corner. They even make room for Linda Lovelace.

So if like me you have a passion for big intimidating books that will make your friends think you’re really smart, this is one that will look most handsome on your shelf.





I left my home in Norfolk Virginia, California on my mind.
I straddled that Greyhound, and rode him into Raleigh,
And on across Caroline.
We stopped in Charlotte and bypassed Rock Hill,
And we never was a minute late.
We was ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown,
Rollin' out of Georgia state.

We had motor trouble it turned into a struggle,
Half way 'cross Alabam,
And that 'hound broke down and left us all stranded
In downtown Birmingham.

Right away I bought me a through train ticket,
Ridin’ cross Mississippi clean
And I was on that midnight flyer out of Birmingham
Smoking into New Orleans.
Somebody help me get out of Louisiana
Just help me get to Houston town.
There are people there who care a little 'bout me
And they won't let the poor boy down.

Sure as you're born, they bought me a silk suit,
Put luggage in my hands,
And I woke up high over Albuquerque
On a jet to the promised land.

Workin' on a T-bone steak a la carte
Flying over to the Golden State;
When the pilot told us in thirteen minutes
He would set us at the terminal gate.

Swing low sweet chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone;
Cut your engines and cool your wings,
And let me make it to the telephone.

Los Angeles give me Norfolk Virginia,
Tidewater four ten O nine
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin'
And the poor boy's on the line.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, there aren't enough stars in the "heaventree" of the goodreads system to do justice to A New Literary History of America. This book collects 200 essays to trace America's literary history from 1507 when the name America first appeared on a map to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. In between is an incredible journey celebrating not only the important moments in our literature but such other significant things as song lyrics, hallmark speeches and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some of these essays are remarkable. The ones on Lolita, Ralph Walso Emerson, and the long history of the jeremiad in political speeches, continuing even today, stood out for me. I think some are brilliant--Stephen Schiff's 6-page essay on Lolita is as good as anything I've ever read on Nabokov's novel. I feared that subjects and writers this varied would produce more negative views. I can recall only 3 of these essays I considered rants by people with an ax to grind, one by an Amerind and 2 others about race. I thought they had no place in such a commemorative jamboree as this. Overall this book of insightful and thought-provoking essays is essential criticism tracing our history and our literature.

[James S. · Rating 1 out of 5]

More a collection of short essays on a random assortment of topics than a literary history. A better title would have been something like "Essays on American Culture."

Those topics that are included are frequently analyzed in a grating academic-ese. Words or phrases like “the other," "the self," "discourse," "multiplicity," "interpenetration," "poetics," "dialectic," "parse," "public/private space," "gendered," "temporal," "mimetic," "render," "problematic," "limn," or "normative” are ubiquitous and grating.

Although the editors claim that "there is no party line in this book" (xxvi), the book might as well have been titled "A Marxist's Literary History of America," so leftist are virtually all of the essays.

Despite all of that, there are a handful of thoughtful, readable essays. Here are my ratings:

5s - There were 16 of these:

"Fear and Love in the Virginia colony" - 1607
"A nearer neighbor to the Indians" - 1643
"Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters" - 1722
"Two national anthems" - 1814
"Phyllis Wheatley" - 1773
"The slave narrative" - 1838
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" - 1851
"Lincoln's second inaugural address" - 1865
"The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument" - 1897
" 'The real American has not yet arrived ' " - 1903
"The Scopes Trial" - 1925
"The Silent Enemy" - 1930
"Billie Holiday, 'Strange Fruit' " - 1939
"Preston Sturges" - 1940
"Integrating the Military" - 1946
" 'The Birth of the Cool' " - 1949

4s - There were 31 of these.

3s - 97 of these.

2s - 58 of these.

1s - 11 of these.

This comes out to a ratio of 21% good to 79% bad. Overall, a disappointing book.

[Diann Blakely]

Co-edited by one of this country's most dazzlingly wide-ranging, prolific, and intellectually charismatic writers, Greil Marcus, among the most celebrated nonfiction volumes in the past year, this vast, wickedly vibrant--Ann Marlowe on Linda Lovelace?--education between covers must come with a small note of warning: an extended trance state induced by the treasure-like essays here can produce incidents such as dropping "the Harvard book" on one's still-asleep-foot, causing it turn bruise-black and viciously painful, to say nothing of the volume's own spine!) This 50-state endeavor was, astonishingly, followed by a compendium of Marcus’s work on Bob Dylan, which has already attained canonical status (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...), and WHEN THAT ROUGH GOD GOES RIDING: LISTENING TO VAN MORRISON (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/boo...), is likely to attain a similar one. Marcus rightly points to Peter Gerstenzang’s New York Times review of the Morrison work as the best interpretation — Gerstenzang writes that it is “more a series of nonfiction short stories than a straightforward analysis.” Marcus also writes that the chapter devoted to “Take Me Back” was happy-making in the process of its composition. When "Real Life Rock Top Ten" ran on SALON, which inexplicably dropped it, to to speak, Marcus made me very happy by, among other things, praising the film version of ABOUT A BOY, though I don't share his reservations about Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance of the Morrison song in GEORGIA (http://www.salon.com/2002/05/28/69).

Reviews of “the Harvard book” have been stellar, of course, and like the Dylan volume, it’s one to be savored, an essay at a time (also a good means of preventing household accidents such as that described above). Marcus’ partner in this enormous undertaking was Harvard’s Cabot Professor of English Literature and African-American Studies, Werner Sollors, but the pair worked with a board of editorial writers, who, Marcus said drolly in a NEW YORK TIMES interview, sometimes nominated themselves as well as others. The final list must have been daunting to behold. Then Marcus and Sollors were faced with an equally Herculean task: choosing writers for the pieces, which didn’t always go according to plan. Surely the most amusing anecdote about the construction of the book was the editors’ attempt to wrest a knowledgeable piece combining discussion of two 1936 classics, William Faulkner’s ABSALOM, ABSALOM! and Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND. (In case anyone cares, I place the former novel with ULYSSES as the past century’s greatest achievement in the Anglophone variety of the genre, and I agree with Marcus’ assessment of Faulkner’s gorgeously intertwined and overlapping stories–which are far easier to figure out than Joyce’s, at least if you’ve read The Odyssey–as “scary. Much more so than THE SOUND AND THE FURY, which is more nihilistic.”) Yet when Marcus contacted Virginia’s Lee Smith and Kentucky’s Bobbie Ann Mason, neither had ever read Mitchell’s book. Next stop: Carolyn Porter, a native of Texas and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “Read it?” she replied. “I’ve memorized it.” At this point in American history, literary and otherwise, more people have seen the movie than plowed through Mitchell’s long road of red clay, causing me to wondered if Robert Polito’s superb latest book of poems, HOLLYWOOD AND GOD (University of Chicago Press) shouldn’t have been titled Hollywood IS God.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some numbers: 1044 pages. 223 essays. Five pages for every essay. 201 essayists. Three essayists (the editors, Marcus and Sollors, plus David Thomson) with three or more essays. Twelve editorial board members, recruiting, a number of whom write twice. Fourteen contributors without University affiliation, only one of these on the Editorial Board. Five of the so-called "Seven Arts" (Painting, Literature, Theater, Sculpture, Architecture, Dance, Music) represented among the 223 with an essay. One essay on Architecture -- one more than on Dance or Sculpture. Eighteen essays on poetry. Fifteen essays on movies. Five essays on painting. Ten essays on Twentieth Century poetry. Twelve poets with book publication entrusted to write essays. Two essays on rock 'n' roll music. Six other essays on vernacular music. Eight essays on jazz and popular music. Three essays on theater. 47 essays on the novel. Etc.

Some description: The essays focus on a year, sometimes a date, sometimes an hour on a date in a year, and move chronologically, 1507-2008. An event, say, Allen Ginsberg's October 7, 1955 reading at the Six Gallery, in San Francisco, of his new work, "Howl," will be isolated, not for its capacity to de-mystify some canonical text (as in The New Historicism), but for its being a harbinger of a mode of responsibility among the youth culture which would, in the case of "Howl," valorize the poem over the next decade.

Some inferences. "Literary," as in the book's title, is that which is provided by the preponderance of literary scholars who make up the rolls of 201 contributors. One of the editors, Marcus, talking to the New York Times, claims that the title A New Cultural History was avoided for being too trendy, but this is disingenuous, since if it was a cultural history the numbers tabulated above would need to at least seem representative, and the editors have not bothered. No, for the editors, it is a literary history, so we're left with the question, how does the volume construe "the literary"? And for the moment, at least, I'm left with the obvious reply, that the literary is supplied by those writing about these cultural and historical moments emendated for some reason or another.

Now, surely this distorts the traditional service philological scholars are thought to provide in establishing texts. More pointedly, the editors have merely sloughed off the blurring of cultural/literary text "history" can partake of but criticism better damn well have in focus. I graded the volume at three stars -- an absorbing if parochial survey -- until late I reached Joshua Clover's essay on Dylan, the first in the volume to encounter "the literary" of its title in relation to the cultural formation its claim enacts.

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a literary history, this book seems to do everything it possibly can to avoid being about books.

The back cover should give you a clue about this. It mentions essays like:
- The name 'America' appears for the first time
- The president delivers a six-minute speech
- D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is released
- Bob Dylan writes "Song to Woody"
- Barack Obama is elected
The thing you might notice is that none of these essays are about books. And so goes kindof a surprising number of essays in the collection. Some of them are more about books than they seem to be - "Two Days in Harlem" turns out to be about Ralph Ellison - but some aren't. "Citizen Kane" is about Citizen Kane, which is not a book. Much of American literature is either ignored or mentioned only glancingly.

And the quality of the essays is uneven, too. The piece on slave narratives is absolutely terrific, but the one on Huck Finn totally reads the book wrong.

This is worthwhile if you can find it used, but it's not as great as you're hoping it'll be.

[Kyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really good collection of essay, but it does take some time getting used to. There is a lot in quite a small space (and font) and you should not expect the essays to explain what the stories/movies/speeches/etc. are about: they give really interesting arguments and views, but if you don't know the basics of the thing the essay is about you might get lost. That aside, this is a perfect way to get a glimpse into the cultural/literary history of the United States through a lot of different stories, views and ideas. It's is not a whole, not one big story from the beginning to the end, but it is a collection of different moments, of different events throughout US history.
I read this for a semester-long course, and clearly I have not read the whole thing, but the parts that I read were overall great!

[Sarah Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A challenging, engrossing, and wonderfully rewarding compendium of essays on this country's literary history -- from John Smith to Phillis Wheatley to Edith Wharton to Miguel Pinero. It focuses primarily on the written word, but also on visual arts: one of the best pieces in the book is on Maya Lin and the Vietnam Memorial, while another great essay discusses the Hays Code and the question of film censorship. This studies a canon of work that is wonderfully varied, and part of the joy is stumbling from an essay on, say, Harriet Beecher Stowe onto one about Linda Lovelace. It is also deeply committed to addressing questions of representations of those Americans who may nonwhite, female, Jewish, LGBTQ, and beyond. That said, I was disappointed there was not one mention of the September 11th attacks within the scope of culture, nor any references to any Arab-American artists. And an essay that handles the birth of the Asian American cultural movement in the sixtes does not mention the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, something I found an egregious oversight. I also would have loved to see essays on Roots, on To Kill a Mockingbird, on Barack Obama's 2004 DNC speech (the book discussed several other political addresses, including JFK's Inaugural Address and FDR's Fireside Chats), and to see even a mention of science fiction writing and/or films. These quibbles aside, it is a monumental work that enhanced my appreciation of American cultural history.

[Jennifer Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one has some serious heft - both figuratively and literally. It would have taken me ages to read all of the essays, but it was fun to read through the ones that caught my attention during the 3 weeks I had it from the library. From the Revolution through the election of Barack Obama, the essays trace the history of the United States through literature. My favorite essays covered Hurricane Katrina, the legalization of gambling in Nevada, the Book of Mormom, Hawthorne and Melville, and an analysis of Sister Carrie and the House of Mirth, two of my favorite American novels.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dave Hickey and Ishmael Reed's essays, on Hank Williams and Huck Finn respectively, are brilliant. There's a tremendous amount of amazing material here- a few mediocrities, to be sure, and some clunkers, maybe, but the overall effect is stimulating, accessible, creative, and often counter-intuitive, which is precisely how I like 'em...and a book about American literary (more like cultural) history deserves no less...

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant collection of dozens of essays, by as many different authors, covering different aspects of American culture, literature, art, music, movies, and much else, from 1507 to 2008. Whether you read it cover to cover or dip into it here and there, it is a delight.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: America the Beautiful reference book

This massive survey describes America as "a made-up nation", its literature "not inherited but invented" or "discovered, as if it were a gold strike." "Made in America" is not just an advertising slogan but a description of the literary and material culture covered here. (p. xxii-xxiv). This is a literary history of America, not a history of American literature, even though the two intertwine.

Consisting of more than 200 4- to 6-page essays written by about 200 modern authors (a few author two or more essays, but most only one), the book takes a broad view of literature. Books, poems, political speeches, sermons, art and writing about art, music, movies, and technology like the assembly line, the telephone, and radio are all documented here. Each essay concludes with a short bibliography of references used or recommended by the essayist for digging deeper, making this the ideal reference book for any home, school, or public library (I was disappointed when a search of my county's public library did not find any branch that owned a copy). I ended up with 20 new books on my reading wish list!, many of which the libraries do own, but without a quality reference book like this how will readers find these important gems hidden an their shelves? That said, I gave A New Literary History only four out of five stars because as is a characteristic inherent to anthologies like this the quality of the writing of 200 different essayists varies.

A common thread through the literature of our history has been and remains strongly in the 21st century the spiritual destination and political definition of this self-constructed country. From the 1670 invocation of the "errand into the wilderness" by Puritan pastor Samuel Danforth (p. 40) to annual Fourth of July speeches, "we must acknowledge the gap between our ideals and current realities; we must reject corruption, greed, selfishness, and other sins, and finally we must work together to restore our superiority among the world's nations." (p. 43) Referencing a 17th century woodcut portrait of a priest as the image of God in or "stamped" on us (p. 46) and the Enlightenment-soaked Fathers Founding "a 'people' on the basis of natural rights--rather than to commit an existing country or an existing people to such principles--is an improbable thing to do" (p. 102), which makes even more "remarkable, then, that the Constitution makes no mention whatever of any divine sanction, no prayer for divine assistance."--it is a "secular revelation"(p. 109). Washington at the constitutional convention (p. 122) shaped the discussion about executive powers just by being there (see the discussion about that in Myth America) and Jefferson believed, perhaps because of the image of God embodied in their natural rights, that these new Americans could "be trusted to make the right decisions." (p. 139)

Of course we have often not made the right decisions, as evidenced in many of the literary references here to

--The "American contradiction between killing Indians and becoming them" (p. 204) in frontier confrontations where the American technology and perfected system of manufacturing made the guns that "won" the west (p. 354).

-- The seldom contradicted American solidarity of support for Black slavery that "pitted the character and integrity of the founders against the citizenship claims put forward by blacks" (p. 361) that were denied in the Dred Scott case because "the honor of the most esteemed of white men depended on 'common consent' that blacks constituted a degraded race", as the ruling stated.

--The marginalized voices of women, Asian, Hispanic, and Black creators. W. E. B. Dubois (p. 469), Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison (p. 710) trace a lineage to Zora Neale Huston (p. 852), Maya Angelou (p. 968), Gayl Jones (p. 988),and Toni Morrison (p. 993), whose landmark appearance on the cover of Newsweek in 1981 was followed in 2006 by her novel Beloved being named best American novel of the past 25 years (p. 996).The challenges to the design of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC by the young, Asian American, female architect Maya Lin only arose after the blind selection process and the unveiling of those marginalizing descriptors (p. 1006). The Puerto Rican poetic culture crystallized in the 1970s around the "Nuyorican Poets Cafe" on New York City's lower east side (p. 977) where it is still an active venue.

Movies, comic strips (p. 493) and sound as literature arrived in the 20th century. From the essay on early color comic strips (p. 497):

Like film, comics are concerned with events unfolding in time. However, reading comics and watching films are very different visual experiences. Whereas a director controls how and when a cinematic narrative develops, a comic-strip artist has less power over the reader's temporal experience. The whole page is available to the viewer, who is in command of how quickly the story develops.

And see "The Mouse that Whistled", from 1928 (p. 627), about Steamboat Willie's debut of a whistling, wiggling, loud animated Mickey Mouse, and "You're Swell!", 1930 (p. 632), describing the rapid-fire dialogue of newly-vocal movies--"tough, gritty, sassy, populist" (p. 633) like the Depression years that spawned them. And of course music, from the blues of Billy Holiday to the nascent rock and roll of Chuck Berry and the finely-crafted country heartbreaks of Hank Williams, became quintessential American literature.

Which raises the question what does it mean to be an American intellectual vs an intellectual in this made-up America? "To be an intellectual in the United States still means, above all, to have a certain literacy in certain landmark moments in the history of European thought." (p. 240). Henry James, perhaps the most European of American writers, in his book The American Scene written in 1907 after 20 years abroad (and now on my reading wish list), wrote of the uncertainty of the " 'American' character--what type, as a result of such a prodigious amalgamation, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived of shaping itself?" (p. 492).

It means to be willing to ask, as John F. Kennedy did, what we will be willing to do for our country (p. 876), and to be willing to answer as Joseph Heller did in Catch-22 just a year later. It means being strong enough, independent enough, stamped with the image of truth to face "the future [that] never happened" even if we think it did or wish it did. (p. 927). America is both the Beautiful of the song and the mess of our history in the literature we have made to sing of it. I hope you have a chance to lay hands on this book and add to your own personal American wish list.

[Julieann Wielga · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me three and one half years to read this book. Sometimes I would read a couple a day and sometimes I would not read any essays for a months.

Some of the essays flew over my head. Some were very thought provoking.

The interpretation of Literary is very broad. I learned these things from this cultural history. History happens all the time. It happens on all scales to all people. We cull our stories to fit in a particular grouping. Lots of stories are about guys and written about buys and most of those guys are white.

I was completely drawn to the people who contributed to the cultural/historical story line who were not white and or were not men. This book brought some to the forefront that were new to me: Frederick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony,my favorite Ida B. Wells (black woman)who printed a pamphlet on the story of lynching in 1895, Paul Dunbar,Willa Cather,Frost (OK he is a guy and so it Hawthorne, Manie Smith,Ralph Ellson,Billy Holdicay,Maya Angelou and Tony Morrison.

[Ted Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This comprehensive literary history and commentary on American literature presented in fairly brief essays on our history startled and intrigued me. I still refer to it from time to time because as yet I have not exhausted its insight and charm. I am a great fan of Greil Marcus and now Werner Sollors.

I found fresh articles that introduced me to literature I had not know and means to further explore those entries.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

a MUST have for anybody who is serious about their fiction in the 20th century west (and 21st some too). So get this and keep it next to your dictionary. much better than any google or wiki could ever be. why? because greil marcus put a lot of thought, sweat and soul in here too. Think of this as the Oxford Atlas of the World or Roget's or Websters or OED of cool lit.

[Brett]

Fucking finished! The greatest value of this book is that it reveals a lot of the b-sides of American literature. Will make an accompanying reading list soon.

Norman Mailer shows up a bit too much for my liking but oh well.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mainly gold, with a little dross.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some passages are far too academic for me, making it something I have to be in the mood for. Sounded much more interesting than it actually was.

[Chris Wharton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my longest book (1050 pages of the main body) read from beginning to end over the longest period of time (begun two days after Christmas 2019, a present from son Ben, finished June 20, 2020, Father's Day eve), this 2009 collection from Harvard University Press offers 222 four- to six-page essays by 201 contributors on a welter of topics both in American literary history (from major figures to the heretofore-to-me unknown) and in America's larger history--to illustrate the scope of the latter, I'll just quote from the editors' introduction about nonliterary subjects included: "Stephen Foster; the invention of the telephone; the Winchester rifle; 'Steamboat Willie'; Alcoholics Anonymous; 'Porgy and Bess'; the first issue of 'Life'; the atomic bomb; Jackson Pollock's drip paintings; Chuck Berry's 'Roll Over, Beethoven'; Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho'; and Ronald Reagan's 1964 campaign speech for Barry Goldwater" (even this from the editors seems weighted toward the 20th century, so I will add that earlier centuries are not shortchanged even while they were less prolific). The essays are ordered chronologically by subject from 1507 ("The name 'America' appears on a map") to November 4, 2008 ("Barack Obama," a primarily visual presentation). I chose to read from beginning to end, one entry a day at happy-hour time while I was also reading "Books of the Century" (the 600-page 100-year retrospective anthology from the New York Times Book Review, also a Christmas present from Ben), and then two entries a day once I finished the latter in late March, as I felt I might miss quite a bit if I just left the book out to pick up now and then and sample an entry here and an entry there on no particular schedule or routine. There is of course a great deal of variation among the entries in approach and readability (and in degree of personal interest); ideologically, viewpoints tend leftward, with race, ethnicity, gender, diversity, and inclusion frequent areas of focus or sharpening the critical approach. Happily enough, however, most entries are not overly pedantic or academic (no footnotes, only a few primary and/or secondary sources listed at the end of each entry). Some that I liked most or found most interesting follow: "1607: Fear and love in the Virginia colony" (about explorer John Smith); "1670: The American jeremiad" (Puritan preaching); "1683: Francis Daniel Pastorius" (founder of the Germantown area of Philadelphia, where son Ben lives, and author of the first antislavery tract in America); "1692: The Salem witchcraft trials" (much on Hawthorne and later American writers); "1740: The Great Awakening"; "Late 1740s; 1814, September 13-14: Two national anthems" ("Yankee Doodle," "The Star-Spangled Banner"); "1784: Charles Willson Peale"; "1820, November 27: Landscape with birds" (Audubon); "1850: 'The Scarlet Letter'"; "1850, August 5: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville"; "1851: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'"; "1855: The book of a lifetime" (Whitman, "Leaves of Grass"); "1881, January 24: 'Portrait of a Lady'"; "1900; 1905: 'Sister Carrie' and 'The House of Mirth'"; "1905, October 15: 'Little Nemo in Slumberland'"; "1912, April 15: Lifeboats cut adrift" (Titanic but more on Eugene O'Neill); "1913: A Modernist Moment" (Armory Show. Paterson strike, et al); "1915: A lover's quarrel with the world" (Robert Frost); "1925: 'The Great Gatsby'"; "1925, July: The Scopes trial"; "1925, August 16: Girls who wear glasses" (Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay); "1926: Book-of-the-Month Club"; "1927: The American songbag" (Carl Sandburg); "1928, April 8, Easter Sunday: Dilsey Gibson goes to church" ("The Sound and the Fury"); 1930, October: Grant Wood's 'American Gothic'"; "1932, April or May: The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty" (Henry Ford); "1934, September: Robert Penn Warren"; "1935: The skyscraper"; "1936:'Gone With the Wind' and 'Absalom, Absalom!'"; "1939: Billie Holiday, 'Strange Fruit'"; "1943: Hemingway's paradise, Hemingway's prose"; "1945, February: Bebop" (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie); "1945, April 11: Thomas Pynchon and modern war"; "1955, December: Nabokov's 'Lolita'"; "1961, January 20: JFK's inaugural and 'Catch 22'"; "1961, July 2: The author as advertisement" (Hemingway); "1962: Bob Dylan writes 'Song to Woody'"; "1963, April: 'Letter From Birmingham Jail'"; "1965, October: 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X'"; "1968: Norman Mailer"; "1969, November 12: The eye of Vietnam" (My Lai, defoliation); "1970; 1972: Linda Lovelace"; "1982: Maya Lin's wall" (Washington Vietnam memorial); "1995: Philip Roth"; "2001: Twenty-first century free verse"; "2005, August 29: Hurrican Katrina." 'Nuff said, thanks, Ben!

[Bucket · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are more than 200 essays in this doorstopper (1000+ densely-typed pages) and I took my time with them, reading this over eight months.

First, the good.

1. I really enjoyed the chronological structure and formatting details (relevant year at the start of each, titles and subheads that are tailored to each essay rather than following a set format).

2. The book strays pretty far from literature, commenting on not just non-fiction, plays, and poetry, but also movies, music, political speeches and art. At first I was thrown by that, but I came to enjoy it.

3. There are also 50-ish really excellent essays here, that are illuminating or deeply personal and unique or really well-written or nostalgic in the best way, or all of the above.

But.

The majority of these essays are just okay, and a few are downright bad. There are many that are clearly uninspired (someone checking a box so the editors could call a literary phase or author covered) and a few that are actively bad. More than a few border on nonsensical with their academic-speech. You know, verbosity for verbosity's sake. A handful already feel politically or socially dated.

Overall, I did enjoy the read and learned quite a bit!

[Richard Subber · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, it’s literary and it’s history and it’s American.
The entries are written by candid, eagerly informed, and gratuitously didactic academics who probably love to read this kind of stuff.
For my taste, A New Literary History of America is disconnected, faddish, and acutely sensitive to nuances of language and context that lots of readers (like me) don’t care about too much.
Andy Warhol isn’t listed as a consulting editor, but I think he would have taken the job if he’d been available.

Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[ػᶈᶏϾӗ]

Many of the other reviews note that this book isn't worth reading from beginning to end. I agree but perhaps for a different reason. Taken individually, any of these essays could be insightful and interesting. Read together, however, and they seem to totally elide white supremacy and imperialism, colonial violence, early capitalism, and euro-american ideology. It feels wildly out of touch with our contemporary era, in other words, and while I could imagine using an essay or two to supplement a class, I grew incredibly frustrated with just trying to read it.

[Tjalling Snabilie · Rating 5 out of 5]

After 11 long weeks, it is done. even though I only had to read so much for my course, I went ahead and read through the entire thing. After all, wouldn't you say that it's a waste to have to read a book for uni, but only a quarter to a third of it?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading all the different essays, all of whom offered me perspectives on matters I had not yet thought about, sometimes never even heard of! To those wanting to dive deeper into American history from an unusual approach, I would recommend them this work, but do note that it'll eat up a lot of time.

[TJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book consists of many different essays. It touches an enormous variety of subjects and definitely gave me a better idea of America. You don't need to read all of them, you also don't need to read them in chronological sequence. Some are better written than others, but overall it's well written. What I particularly enjoyed was that some essays deal with themes that are not much written about, for example the history of written records of Native American languages.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took a little while to get through (two years!). A deeply satisfying anthology of bite-sized literary history and criticism. The wide-angle lens on the stories that made America has been a vital balm during the end-times of the Trump presidency. Anyone interested in the project of America would love the hell out of this.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a "traditional" body of lit-crit, this is a Harvard-centric look at the "documents" that comprise a Harvard-centric America. Harvard IS the oldest institution of "higher learning" in the USA. So it maybe isn't "bad," or beyond reason, that Harvard Fellows and Harvard grads predominate not only in the writing but in the written about (35% of the material is by or about Harvard in some way). The writing is, sometimes, stellar even when it is stridently academic, or perhaps "academicist." The best of the writing steps away from academic sensibilities in the strictest sense. It's a wide-ranging tome and, the subjects -- be they people, places, things -- are, generally, deserving. I'll even be drawn back, on occasion I'm sure, to reread a piece or two.

[Stven · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection of short essays in a marvelously broad range of topics in American history by a great many writers, this book is so huge in scope that it needs to be owned and kept handy for a year or two to be properly appreciated. I've only scratched the surface with a few at the beginning (how "America" first came to appear on a map) and a few at the end. Some of these essays are fascinating and others are useless -- for instance, an essay that purports to be about modern poetry but amounts to nothing more than name-dropping names of poets and poetry journals unknown -- but there's a great deal to be learned in here and the overwhelming effect is positive. This would make a great Christmas or birthday gift.

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

The literary history of the United States through its more and less well-known writers, the speeches of presidents, declarations of independence, the birth of the Blues and Jazz to end with the election of the first black president. Although this manual was really long, it has been interesting.

La storia della letteratura degli Stati Uniti attraverso i suoi piú e meno noti scrittori, i discorsi dei presidenti, le dichiarazioni di indipendenza, la nascita del Blues e quella del Jazz per finire con l'elezione del primo presidente nero. Anche se lungo é stato un manuale interessante.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would love to take the time to peruse this book at my leisure. I got it from the library and as such, did not have time to read more than a few pieces. That being said - I enjoyed the topics immensely. It was interesting to read through the "history of America" from a different perspective. The title may be misleading to those who are expecting literary to be about books only. The author includes songs, speeches and other types of written works. I may add it to my kindle shelves to read at leisure. Note - it is over 1000 pages of single topic short essays.

[Gene Doucette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an anthology of essays covering the literary history of America. There are sections that are brilliant and informative, other sections that are dense and difficult, but as a whole, it's an excellent read. A good book to have lying around when you need to read something but not a LOT of something. It took several months of casual reading to get through, which was exactly the pace called for.