for Emily, wherever I may find her

Got an exciting book at the Emily Dickinson house, and gave myself the indulgence of reading fifty pages of it on the drive back here. A Summer of Hummingbirds, by Christopher Benfy. It's about Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, whose disparate worlds converged at the end of the American Civil War, and a new phase of American literature began. American culture, as the blurb says, "caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment, and a new, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all." The hummingbird is a controlling and powerful metaphor.

The book seems quite well written. I'll save it for a reward when I finish grading.

Joe