Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 254

July 22-23, 2017: Crowd-sourced Historical Fictions

[Last week, I began teaching my graduate American Historical Fiction: Practice and Theory class for the fourth time, this time as a hybrid course. So this week I’ve briefly highlighted (busy with teaching and all) a handful of exemplary historical fictions and related contexts, leading up to this crowd-sourced post drawn from the responses and nominations of fellow HistoricalFictionStudiers. Add your own in comments, please!]Responding to Monday’s post, Bill Harshaw writes, “It's been 60 years or so since I was reading Kenneth Roberts' novels. Though Roberts was popular, I think one of the most popular historical fiction writers of the time, and apparently quite conservative, he did present Benedict Arnold as a hero. Would be interesting to see what a modern audience and modern historians make of him.” Kisha Tracy also goes “Old School: Rafael Sabatini, Samuel Shellabarger, and Kenneth Roberts.” Of Roberts she writes, “Haven't read him for a while, so hoping he holds up. But I enjoyed him when I was younger.” And she adds, “Bernard Cornwell and Marion Zimmer Bradley too, and Baroness Orczy.”Other nominations:Paige Wallace writes, “I'm a big fan of the Outlander series. Gabaldon does an amazing job of recreating history and using historical events to shape her story.” She adds, “Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great is a wonderful book as well. Sometimes Russian history can be difficult to get into because of all the names and details but he does a fantastic job of putting it all together that makes it not only educational but enjoyable!”Kelley Smolinksi shares, “ Lord of the Flies has become a favorite to teach - especially when comparing the events of the novel to events in the war. Especially when we look at how people fight each other and how quickly it spirals.”Abby Mullen highlights “Patrick O’Brian!,” adding “I often joke that you should never read a history book about the Age of Sail unless one of its blurbs invokes his name.”On O’Brian, Diana Muir Appelbaum Tweets, “Re-read O’Brian recently. Surprised by how 1980s/90s it felt.” She adds a thread of further thoughts on the series, beginning here. Debbie Lelekis writes, “I love Isabel Allende's books: Island Beneath the Sea, Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia. And anything by Geraldine Brooks (especially Year of Wonders and Caleb's Crossing).” She adds, “Caleb's Crossing would be really interesting to teach in a course about early America because it's about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard in the seventeenth century.”Akeia Benard seconds Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea . Michael Giannasca shares, “I read For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway a few months ago and I thought it was great.”Veronica Hendrick highlights Upton Sinclair’s Manassas: A Novel of the Civil War and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels , along with the historical epics of James Michener and Leon Uris.Jonathan Silverman writes, “LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker is great.”Michele Townes highlights, “ Winds of War and War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk,” adding, “the narrator for the audiobook does all the dialects and makes the series come to life.”Matt Ramsden writes, “George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is great. Also the audiobook is amazing.” Ilene Railton adds, “Just finished this and was blown away. Very powerful, strange, funny, and so tragic.” And Andrea Grenadier adds, “I LOVED that book! It just ambushes you throughout, with such crazy beauty and tragedy. I have never read anything like it.”Tim McCaffrey highlights Louis de Bernieres’ (Captain) Corelli’s Mandolin [different names in the UK and US].Rala Diakite nominates, “Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones . It's about the 1937 massacre in Haiti. Loved this.”AnneMarie Donahue highlights Alison Weir and Philippa Gregory., to which Veronica Hendrick adds Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall . Jennifer Fielding seconds the Weir recommendation.

James Golden shares, "I really enjoyed Sharon Kay Penman's The Sun in Splendour , about Richard III."Petri Flint writes, “I semi-recently read Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and loved it.”Diego Ubiera nominates Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World .Vincent Kling shares, “Mary Lee Settle has a fine set of five novels going from Cromwell's England to Mother Jones about the settlement of the present West Virginia. Collectively called O Beulah Land, not to be confused with other novels of the same title. The best one is the second, itself titled O Beulah Land .DeMisty Bellinger-Delfeld writes, “I like Timothy Schaffert ( The Swan Gondola ) and The Book of Harlan by Bernice McFadden is a quick and powerful read.”

Jeff Warmouth nominates John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor .Andrew DaSilva highlights, “ The Thorn Birds , as it’s not historical in the conventional sense but it takes place over like 50 plus years from the turn of the century to the 1970’s covering the life and times of this one family. In the background is the history and its effects on the family, whether something obvious like the 1st and 2nd world wars or something more subtle like the advent of the radio or screens on the windows to keep bugs out. And of course there’s the Stephen King novel 11/22/63 which too was a good read but tends to lean more on the sci-fi rather on the history aspect despite the whole novel taking place around one particular historical event.”Jeff Renye nominates Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard .Ilene Railton shares, “ The Right Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman.”Shelley Girdner Tweets, “Jane Smiley's recent trilogy (Some Luck, Early Warning, Golden Age) is a different approach: every chapter = a year. Loved the 1st book especially. But also like Dillard's The Living ; & it's out of style, but I still think Michener's Centennial is remarkable.”Erin O’Brien highights alternative historical novels such as Ben Winters’ Underground Airlines and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America , as well as Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City . Jeremy Neely shares Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and James McBride's Good Lord Bird .Brad Congdon nominates Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried , “for foregrounding the fiction in historical fiction.”Karen Shepard (author of a pretty great historical novel herself) highlights, “ The Known World ; almost anything by Jim Shepard; Silk ; The Question of Hu .”Sarah Robbins Tweets, “ News of the World is a great read. I plan to teach it in spring 2018.”Matthew Teutsch adds a bunch via Twitter: Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Ernest Gaines’s Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Frank Yerby’s The Dahomean, Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder, Edward P. Jones’s The Know World, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Fanatics.Lou Freshwater agrees on Sedgwick’s novel, Tweeting, “Hope Leslie should be so much more well known.”And Kari Miller comments, “I would love to teach a class on historical fiction! I am currently at work on a project exploring American literature on Pilgrims and Puritans. So far, I've found about 80+ novels, mostly from the nineteenth century, that have impacted the ways that most Americans think of Pilgrims and Puritans. I think it's especially important to see these works almost as conversations among the authors. Harriet Vaughan Cheney's 1824 A Peep at the Pilgrims should be discussed in conjunction with Hope Leslieand Hobomok; in fact, Sedgwick refers to the novel in Hope Leslie. And James Fenimore Cooper's The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829) is, in many ways, a response to all three of these novels. As I'm working on this project, I'm discovering more intertextuality than I expected.” She adds on Twitter, “Jane Goodwin Austin's novel Standish of Standish (1889) is the origin of the ‘first’ Thanksgiving story. She has Pilgrims inviting Wampanoag.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Any other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?

July 21, 2017: Historical Fictions: Five More Novels

[Last week, I began teaching my graduate American Historical Fiction: Practice and Theory class for the fourth time, this time as a hybrid course. So this week I’ll briefly highlight (busy with teaching and all) a handful of exemplary historical fictions and related contexts. Share your own favorite historical fictions or authors for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]For the fifth post, quick hits on five more nominees for amazing American (or, in one case, Canadian—but I’m a hemispheric AmericanStudier, after all!) historical novels:1)      E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971)2)      Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974)3)      David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981)4)      Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996)5)      Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002)Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?

July 20, 2017: Historical Fictions: James Michener

[Last week, I began teaching my graduate American Historical Fiction: Practice and Theory class for the fourth time, this time as a hybrid course. So this week I’ll briefly highlight (busy with teaching and all) a handful of exemplary historical fictions and related contexts. Share your own favorite historical fictions or authors for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]Today’s nominee for an amazing American historical novel is James Michener’sHawaii (1959).It’s fair to say, using the categories for which I argued in Monday’s post, that Michener’s best-selling historical epics are more period fiction than historical fiction—he’s certainly most interested in human experiences and relationships, rather than in thorny questions of American history per se. But on the other hand, his novels are multi­-period, tracing centuries of community and identity in each of his focal places, and that makes them both unique and in and of themselves historically grounded (and researched) in every effective ways. Most any of those epics could have been my focus here, but Hawaii was really his first in this category, and exemplifies his talents and successes for sure.Last historical fiction tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?

July 19, 2017: Historical Fictions: Cloudsplitter

[Last week, I began teaching my graduate American Historical Fiction: Practice and Theory class for the fourth time, this time as a hybrid course. So this week I’ll briefly highlight (busy with teaching and all) a handful of exemplary historical fictions and related contexts. Share your own favorite historical fictions or authors for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]Today’s nominee for an amazing American historical novel is Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter (1998). I’ll admit it, for a long time I hated Banks’ novel; not because of anything really about it, but because my fallback plan had always been to write a historical novel about John Brown from the point of view of one of his sons, and then Banks went ahead and did that and did it amazingly well. But you can only hold onto your hate for so long before you realize that an amazing historical novel about fathers and sons, family and nation, violence and spirituality, the coming of the Civil War, and heroism and villainy in American identity is worth celebrating. Even if it did crush your dreams a bit.Next historical fiction tomorrow,BencPS. What do you think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?

July 18, 2017: Historical Fictions: Kindred

[Last week, I began teaching my graduate American Historical Fiction: Practice and Theory class for the fourth time, this time as a hybrid course. So this week I’ll briefly highlight (busy with teaching and all) a handful of exemplary historical fictions and related contexts. Share your own favorite historical fictions or authors for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]Today’s nominee for an amazing American historical novel is Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979).The premise of Butler’s science fiction historical novel is simple enough: a 1970s African American woman suddenly finds herself time traveling back into the antebellum South, where she becomes (or rather, is) a slave. But without spoiling the many amazing places where Butler takes her story from there, I’ll just say that she is centrally concerned with some of the most genuinely historical and American themes: family and legacies, race and its continuous yet shifting presence and meanings, love and hope and hatred and death, community and identity in our past, present, and (it is science fiction after all!) future. One of our most unique, significant, and compelling American novels, historical or otherwise.Next historical fiction tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?

July 17, 2017: Historical Fictions: An Overview

[Last week, I began teaching my graduate American Historical Fiction: Practice and Theory class for the fourth time, this time as a hybrid course. So this week I’ll briefly highlight (busy with teaching and all) a handful of exemplary historical fictions and related contexts. Share your own favorite historical fictions or authors for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]On two proposed sub-genres and how they respectively balance history and fiction.
One of the central questions with which any scholar or reader (or even any writer) of historical fiction has to engage is what works in the genre hope to accomplish. There are lots of potential answers to that question, but the fundamental divide is, it seems to me, between accuracy or authenticity on the one hand and effectiveness or readability on the other; between, that is, doing justice to the historical details and periods and events on which a particular novel focuses and doing right by the readers who have picked up said novel. Obviously the choice is not an either/or, but I would argue that as a matter of emphasis and priority these are two very different starting points; and I would go further and argue that much of what we have called historical fiction over the years has chosen very fully to focus on creating entertaining novels for which the history is a backdrop, rather than on creating historical worlds for which the novel is a foreground.
If that has been the emphasis much of the time, it’s an entirely understandable one; readers who seek historical accuracy can always turn to works of historical narrative and scholarship, after all, and a historical novelist who does not connect to his or her readers is likely to produce few sales and a short career. So long as the historical focus is not being explicitly falsified or mythologized, as I have elsewhere argued that the historical details surrounding Reconstruction explicitly and destructively (to the book’s contemporary moment and for our overarching national narratives) are in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a historical novelist focusing mostly on creating compelling characters and story rather than on exploring all of the nuances of that historical world. But if and when a novelist makes that choice, I think it would be very useful for us to have a separate generic category in which we could place the resulting work: not historical fiction but, perhaps, period fiction? If we were to employ that second category in that way, it would allow the term “historical fiction” to be used solely for those novels that do work to create historical worlds first and foremost—and would hopefully likewise allow us to make clear that many such novels and novelists have been able to do so without sacrificing any of their engaging and entertaining qualities in the process.
At or near the top of that list, for me, are the novels in Gore Vidal’s American Chronicle, a series which Vidal has been writing since the late 1960s and which now includes at least six novels (which I will list in chronological rather than publication order; not included here is the recent The Golden Age [2000], only because I haven’t read it and so don’t feel able to comment on whether it’s really part of the series or not): Burr (1973); Lincoln (1984); 1876 (1976); Empire (1987); Hollywood (1990); and Washington, DC (1967). The novels certainly vary in quality, and the more recent novels in the series seem somewhat more explicitly driven by Vidal’s own contemporary political agenda and purposes (a charge that, from what I can tell, applies even more directly to Golden Age); it’s fair to say that a decent percentage of even the kind of genuinely historical fiction about which I’m writing here does feature such central political purposes, and while they don’t necessarily diminish the texts’ success at creating historical worlds, they do often provide the lenses through which we view those worlds. But the earlier books in Vidal’s series, and most especially Burr, are among America’s most fully realized and successful historical novels: both because of how richly they construct their historical worlds (Burr imagines no fewer than three such worlds: the Revolution, the turn of the 19th century, and the 1830s); and because of how immensely readable and fun they are. To coin a phrase, Burr made me laugh, made me cry, and made me think long and hard about—and in fact even do further research into—its historical and national subjects and stories, and that’s a pretty successful historical novel if you ask me.Next historical fiction tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?

July 15-16, 2017: Thoreau’s Bicentennial: Commemorating Henry

[July 12thmarks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to this weekend post on three ways we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]On three distinct but interconnected ways to commemorate Thoreau.1)      Read Faith in a Seed: I’ve made the case throughout the week for broadening our Thoreau canon beyond the most established texts, and one of the most important ways to do so would entail reading Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings . Collected by the wonderful Thoreau scholar Bradley Dean from various works left unfinished at Thoreau’s death (including The Dispersion of Seeds ), Faith in a Seed offers a vision of Thoreau the naturalist and scientist that goes well beyond any of the other works I’ve highlighted in this series (or, indeed, any of the works published in his lifetime). Yet Faith also reflects how much Thoreau’s perspective, ideas, and writing had evolved in the course of his two decades as a published writer—an evolution that highlights the tragedy of his far too youthful passing but also offers a vital challenge to any attempt to define Thoreau only through Walden or any one text or project. For all those reasons, I can’t imagine a more apt bicentennial read than Faith in a Seed. 2)      Visit Walden Pond: Thanks to the efforts of Don Henley(yes, that Don Henley) and many others in the Walden Woods Project, the woods and pond have been largely preserved as they were in Thoreau’s era. As I wrote in this post exactly four years ago, however, even the changes, which have made the pond more accessible to modern visitors, seem to me to be in the spirit of Thoreau’s project and book. The site now features a newly renovated and still evolving Visitor Center, one which in its numerous green elements and initiatives as well as in its exhibits both presents and honors Thoreau’s legacy and vision. Moreover, I can testify from personal experience that simply sitting on the beach at Walden—or, as highlighted in this blog post by a favorite nature writer of mine, walking through the woods as a train passes by—allows you to feel a genuine and moving kinship with both Thoreau and the many millions of others who have spent meaningful time in these spaces. You won’t spend a summer or fall or winter day more happily, and certainly won’t better commemorate Thoreau’s 200th, than by visiting Walden Pond.3)      Walk with Others: Maybe you lived thousands of miles away from Walden, though. And maybe you’re not able to get your hands on a copy of Faith in a Seed. Well, I’m here to tell you that you can commemorate Thoreau’s bicentennial in a deeply appropriate way wherever you are, and with nothing other than your own two feet and (ideally) a companion or two. I don’t know of any American author or figure who more consistently or convincingly made the case for walking than Thoreau, a fact illustrated by the wonderful children’s book character who bears his name. It might seem that solitude was an important part of those walks, and certainly Thoreau wasn’t averse to such solo treks. But as “A Walk to Wachusett” reflects, Thoreau was always more than happy to share his walks, and indeed wrote about such companionship as a vital part of the experience. Having walked around Walden Pond (and many many other places, some familiar to one or all of us, some new to all) with my parents, with my sons, and with other good friends, I can say that here I entirely agree with the sometimes iconoclastic but always interesting and important birthday boy.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. One more time: what do you think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?

July 14, 2017: Thoreau’s Bicentennial: Friendships

[July 12thmarks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]On what three of Thoreau’s social relationships can tell us about the man and his influences.1)      Edward Hoar: Hoar, who was six years younger than Thoreau and grew up across the street from him in Concord, is best remembered as the friend with whom Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire in April 1844, leading to the destruction of more than 100 acres of Concord woods (and, some have argued, leading Thoreau to his Walden project as a kind of penance to those woods). While that was the pair’s most famous experience with nature, it was far from their only excursion; Thoreau and Hoar spent a good deal of time in and around the Concord woods, and upon Thoreau’s untimely death in 1862 he left Hoar a large number of pressed plants from the area (to add to Hoar’s own growing collection). Hoar’s daughter would donate that collection to the New England Botanical Club’s Herbarium in 1912, providing a clear and shared legacy of Thoreau and Hoar’s friendship and shared love of nature. 2)      (William) Ellery Channing: If the forest fire offers one possible origin point for the Walden project, another is a statement attributed (in Thoreau’s journals) to Thoreau’s friend Channing, who in March 1845 is said to have told Thoreau, “Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.” Channing, Thoreau’s age and the nephew of the famous Unitarian minister of the same name (which led the younger Channing to be known as Ellery), was a budding poet and member of the Transcendentalists, and many of his poems were published in the group’s journal The Dial. But he is perhaps best known as Thoreau’s first biographer, as he published Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, with Memorial Verses in 1873, just eleven years after Thoreau’s death. Thoreau and Channing were among the younger Transcendentalists, but Channing’s biography reflects the influence that Thoreau had on everyone in the group during his brief but important life and career.3)      Ralph Waldo Emerson: Few American friendships have been studied and analyzed more fully than that between Thoreau and his Concord friend and Transcendentalist mentor Emerson. Whether or not Thoreau actually had the legendary jail cell exchange with Emerson, it certainly embodies a key distinction between the two men, emphasizing Thoreau’s activism against Emerson’s philosophical orientation. Emerson also dedicated one of his more unique pieces of writing to his late friend: the 1862 eulogy essay “Thoreau.” Yet I think Thoreau can also be put in direct conversation with Emerson’s first published essay, “Nature,” and particularly with that essay’s opening, title section (source of the famous “transparent eyeball” metaphor among other oft-quoted moments). On the one hand, Thoreau’s Walden project can be seen as a direct enactment of that section’s ideas, such as: “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society”; and “In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages.” But at the same time, I would argue that Emerson’s vision of Nature remains entirely subjugated to human interests and perspectives (“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit”), while Thoreau was more able to depart from himself and see and experience nature on its own terms. Last Thoreau post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?

July 13, 2017: Thoreau’s Bicentennial: A Walk to Wachusett

[July 12thmarks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]On a simple and a more complex pleasure of Thoreau’s first published essay.As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, when our collective Thoreau canon expands beyond Walden and “Civil Disobedience” to include his travel writing, it tends to focus on A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Week, written in honor of Thoreau’s late brother John(with whom he had taken the title excursion in 1839 and who passed away from tetanus in 1842), is an interesting and evocative book, and one about which there’s still plenty to say (indeed, my initial plan was to make it the focus of today’s post). But just as adding Tuesday’s text Cape Cod into the mix expands our sense of Thoreau as a travel and nature writer, so too is it worth considering Thoreau’s first such piece of writing, his essay “A Walk to Wachusett.” Based on a July 1842 excursion with his friend Richard Fuller (Margaret’s brother) and published in the Boston Miscellany in January 1843, “Walk” is partly of interest as precisely a very early example of Thoreau’s writing and perspective, two years before he would begin his time in Walden and more than a decade before he’d publish that book. But it also offers two distinct literary pleasures, each of which are worth considering as part of Thoreau’s overall career.For one thing, “Walk” presents perhaps the clearest statement in Thoreau’s body of work of the simple pleasures of exploring the world around us in good company. In this case, that means Mount Wachusett, north-central Massachusetts’ highest peak and one on which “summer and winter [the two young men’s] eyes had rested.” As Thoreau notes, finally exploring such a long-imagined place can have its downside: “we resolved to scale the blue wall which bound the western horizon, though not without misgivings, that thereafter no visible fairy land would exist for us.” Yet much of the essay focuses not on such philosophical concerns, but on precisely the simple and grounded pleasures of the walk and world themselves, as in this beautiful early passage: “Before noon we had reached the highlands overlooking the valley of Lancaster, (affording the first fair and open prospect into the west,) and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some oaks, near to where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested during the heat of the day, reading Virgil, and enjoying the scenery. It was such a place as one feels to be on the outside of the earth, for from it we could, in some measure, see the form and structure of the globe.” Makes me want to stop blogging and start hiking!Thoreau wouldn’t be Thoreau if he didn’t digress into more philosophical threads, though, and “Walk” includes a particularly complex once Thoreau and Fuller reach Wachusett’s summit. To quote the heart of these reflections: “A mountain chain determines many things for the statesman and philosopher. The improvements of civilization rather creep along its sides than cross its summit. How often is it a barrier to prejudice and fanaticism? In passing over these heights of land, through their thin atmosphere, the follies of the plain are refined and purified; and as many species of plants do not scale their summits, so many species of folly no doubt do not cross the Alleghanies; it is only the hardy mountain plant that creeps quite over the ridge, and descends into the valley beyond.” As is often the case, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Thoreau here; but as is always the case, he weds his experiences with and close observations of nature to such social and philosophical ruminations in a unique and compelling way. From the very beginning of his career, Thoreau was bringing such reflections to his walks and his words, and in “A Walk to Wachusett,” as in all of his writings, the text and its readers are all the better for that complex added layer.Next Thoreau post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?

July 12, 2017: Thoreau’s Bicentennial: Walden

[July 12thmarks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]On two new frames for reading and understanding Thoreau’s most famous project.On July 4th, 1845, just eight days shy of his 28th birthday, Thoreau embarked on the two-year experiment that would become one of the most famous living experiences (probably the single most famous such experience, in fact) in all of American history. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the one-year, condensed, narrative version of that experience which he would publish nearly a decade later as Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) is what we collectively remember so well. Indeed, the relationship between the lived experience at Walden and the autobiographical text of Walden has become one of the central areas of study for Thoreau biographers and scholars, and is certainly an interesting (if perhaps overstated, since of course any and all life writing involves shifts from the experiences to the written versions) aspect of the text to consider. But on Thoreau’s 200th birthday, I wanted to gift him and us all with a couple other, somewhat less common frames through which to read and analyze both the sojourn at Walden and the text that it produced.For one thing, I think it’d be pretty interesting to see both Walden projects as offering individualized examples of the period’s ubiquitous social movements. I don’t mean the utopian experiments such as Brook Farmor Oneida, although of course those make for interesting comparisons as well. No, I’m talking about the era’s more grounded social movements, from the Abolitionist Movement to which Thoreau himself was becoming connected in precisely this moment (as I detailed in Monday’s civil disobedience post) to the national Women’s Movement that would truly launch at Seneca Falls almost exactly a year after Thoreau finished his time at Walden. While of course Thoreau’s Walden project was both undertaken by himself and emphasized the importance of solitude, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be linked to such broader social movements, a link that (again) Thoreau’s subsequent addresses on civil disobedience and slavery in Massachusetts would make clear. And within the book we have passages like Chapter 2’s justifiably famous critique of capitalism and labor exploitation (using the metaphor of “sleepers” to describe the workers who have given their lives to build the period’s new railroad lines), sections that might seem quite distinct from other aspects of the text until and unless we see the text as a whole as a form of social protest and activism.At the same time that the Walden projects can thus be seen as profoundly social and communal, I would argue that they also represent a particularly individual life stage: what has in recent years come to be described as the “quarter-life crisis.” Thoreau as the narrator of Waldencan come across as so confident (annoyingly so, at times) in his accumulated experiences and perspective that it’s difficult to remember (although it also makes sense if we consider the confidence of youth) that his two years at the cabin took place before his 30thbirthday. If we reexamine one of the book’s other most famous passages (also from Chapter 2) through this lens, it looks quite a bit different: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Although this passage certainly links to Thoreau’s preachy goals (his desire “to wake up my neighbors”), in it we also see a young man unsure of both his own perspective and whether this project will contribute to it (as reflected by the complex negative frames of “see if I could not learn” and “not … discover that I had not lived”). Reading Walden as a memoir of quarter-life crisis helps humanize Thoreau, and helps us understand that his philosophical discoveries here are as much his own as for the audience to whom he then wants to preach that gospel.Next Thoreau post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?