The author visits American authors' homes, whether the house is from their birth, death, or sometime in between, and gives background information while on the stomping grounds of Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Clemens, and the like.
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of th…
Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth a…
""This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden.""--Choice ""[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, engagement with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In e…
However much Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville differ as writers, says Gilmore, they greatly resemble one another in recognizing a market culture as their common adversary. In such an environment, everything--including literature--is for sale, and customer satisfaction i…
