Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #614 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1128 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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, Harvard professor of English and African-American studies, 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). The book includes entries on not strictly literary themes: the first U.S. natural history collection of painter Charles Willson Peale; the invention of the blues; and the art of Grant Wood. This balancing act is even less sure-footed as we enter present time with entries on Some Like It Hot and the National Football League. Although it is impossible to include every important author in one volume, Sylvia Plath barely gets a nod as does James Merrill. Such are the blemishes on exquisite skin. Overall, 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. 27 illus. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
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 20090922)

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 20091001)

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 need to tell us what the facts mean, and A New Literary History does just that.
--Laura Miller (Salon 20090923)

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 20090826)

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 20090913)

[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 20090901)

[An] essential, eclectic doorstop anthology. (New York Magazine 20090815)

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 20090928)

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 20091009)

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 20090925)

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 experience as seen through a literary glass." Marcus and Sollors have succeeded: This book is a literary history in every sense of the phrase.
--Ron Antonucci (Cleveland Plain Dealer 20091012)

Hundreds of essayists write short, but think expansively on just about everything that makes us who we are--from Elvis to Obama. (Entertainment Weekly 20091007)

It's natural to have high expectations of a book with the lofty title A New Literary History of America. What isn't natural is for the book to not just live up to, but far exceed those expectations...Edgar Allen Poe's invention of the detective story hobnobs with the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Hank Williams' country music is only a few pages from Zora Neale Hurston. It's as glorious a melting pot as America itself...If you've found yourself envying Britain her Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen, this book will bring you back to America and make you fall in love with her confidence, her innovation, her sheer pluck, all over again... A treasure for American history AND literature lovers.
--Michelle Kerns (Boston Examiner 20090927)

You could get a hernia lifting A New Literary History of America, a 1,095-page tome edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. But you could also get a thorough, original, and occasionally startling education. Some 200 essays on our literary past by writers as disparate as critic/provocateur Camille Paglia (on the sexually electric Broadway opening of A Streetcar Named Desire) and sportswriter Michael MacCambridge (on football fiction) make for a book as richly varied as the nation itself. (Fortune 20090927)

The book is not your usual bookish chronicle made up of fearless men churning out classics for the edification of the nation...[It's an] eclectic, opinionated vision of the story of American letters.
--Bill Marx (Arts Fuse 20091105)

A wildly informative, hugely entertaining and sometimes even revelatory book.
--Jeff Simon (Buffalo News 20091018)

Tailor-made for fruitful and fun browsing...This is a reference book for anyone with a curiosity about the sweep and scope of not just American literature but the culture itself in art, film, sermon and song.
--Robert Pincus (San Diego Union-Tribune 20091115)

The feel of the whole is epic...By the time I had made my way through about a third of this book I began to feel an emotion that comes but rarely to a reviewer: pride. Not pride in America's politics or policies necessarily, but pride in our speech...In my opinion perhaps the single most impressive achievement in the book is the editors' and writers' ability to pinpoint linkages between one kind of fact and another...All the major writers, whether in poetry or prose, draw thoughtful essays.
--Larry McMurtry (New York Review of Books 20091124)

The editors of this rich exercise in cultural history have taken up Pound's challenge [to "make it new"], producing an eloquent patchwork volume that gathers up more than 200 essays, chronologically arranged by subject, into a beguiling symphony that expresses the bewildering, often intimidating varieties of what we presume to call the American experience...This splendiferous tribute to the best that so many of us have thought and said and made embraces classic and watershed literary works and their authors, political acts and events and issues, statements of purpose and conscience, achievements in both the fine arts (music, painting, sculpture, et al) and the raucous venues of popular culture (yes, Virginia, we do get a crash course in the autobiographical writings of 1970s porn queen Linda Lovelace), and major figures ranging from the makers of the Constitution of the United States to contemporary film and television personalities and the giants and giantesses of pop, jazz and rock music...Defiantly unconventional...Surely one of the best books published in this country in a very long time.
--Bruce Allen (Washington Times 20091118)

The mammoth New Literary History of America [is] an extraordinary anthology of literary culture brought to you by a seat-of-the-pants polyglot of a country.
--Chris Vognar (Dallas Morning News 20091127)

This new-breed reference book--featuring freshly penned and eccentrically focused essays by a heterogeneous who's who of academics, journalists and authors--ventures to remap the expanse of American history through five centuries of literary and cultural landmarks...Although it shares with its history-book forebears unimpeachable intellect and seriousness of intent, this is not the Oxford Companion to American Literature. For one thing, it's a lot more fun.
--John McAlley (npr.org 20091203)

This hefty yet invigorating anthology of 225 new essays about American culture and history is perfect for the hard-to-please smarty-pants. (Time Out New York )

A New Literary History of America is about what's Made in America, and America, made. It's about what the writers who are its subjects have made of America, and, equally, what the contributors, writing about these writers, make of America, too. There's a certain amount of trading on literary celebrity, to be sure. But the claims on our attention, and it is a serious claim, lies within the republic of these writers' imaginations.
--Jill Lepore (Times Literary Supplement )

In the monumental, absorbing A New Literary History of America, editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have assembled a fascinating collection of writings on a range of subject matters: everything from maps, diaries and Supreme Court decisions to religious tracts, public debates, comic strips and rock and roll...In 1,000-odd pages, Marcus and Sollors have compiled a remarkable history of America. Their expanded definition of literary encompasses "not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form." Most of all, A New Literary History of America is a reminder of just how vibrant and diverse United States history--and culture--really is.
--Lacey Galbraith (BookPage )

About the Author
Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History (both from Harvard), and The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books.

Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Customer Reviews

Quirky and Uneven
A disappointing collection--quirky, self-indulgent, uneven. It is hard to imagine what kind of reader would benefit from reading this volume. Most of the essays are little more than primers on their writers or events (Farah Griffin on Morrison, Greil Marcus on Powers). Many are written by scholars rehashing in capsule form what they or others have presented more richly elsewhere--a quickie on imperialism, anyone? Some are by writers using the author or event as a springboard for meditations ranging from the trite to the clever--Hawthorne is a flimsy pretext for Mukherjee to rehearse, for the umpteenth time, her Bengali Brahmin pedigree and her revolutionary defiance in marrying a white man. Some are from unknown and mediocre scholars writing about areas from which the major scholars have been mysteriously omitted--were the editors really so clueless about these fields, or did they just subcontract these fields to friends and former graduate students?
There are a couple of fine pieces--Walter Mosley on detective fiction , Ishmael Reed on Huck Finn, the essay on Linda Lovelace--but these are too few to make this a worthwhile purchase. If an anthology with over 200 pieces turns up only a handful of standouts, its claims as a "reference" book are overblown. For scholars looking at this volume as a reference, individual pieces would need to be evaluated carefully, since several are written by people who are not experts in the field.

From the first mention of "America" to Obama's election
This massive tome is intended to be a new direction in attempts at writing the literary history of America. There's no implication that this volume is complete in any sense, but rather it's a provocation. They're saying that Linda Lovelace is an important part of who we are today as Americans. (And the argument, talking about autobiography and memoir, rather than pornography, is fairly compelling.) And the "today" part is clearly understood by the editors and the authors. We can look up online, on a whim, a biography of Nathan Hale, a critique of Elvis's movies, or a sampling of what was popular fiction in 1850. Wikipedia and Google are our friends. A book like this therefore needs to be very different. I doesn't need to include the fight over the publication of "Howl" and can analyze the importance of Dr. Seuss instead.

The articles are organized chronologically from 1507 ("America" first appearing on a map) through Barack Obama's election (in collage form) with a higher density of 20th century material. The official website for the book, [...], has the table of contents and a list of the contributors.

Some highlights include Avital Ronell discussing telephony (1876), Walter Mosley on the hardboiled detective noir (1926), Rob Wilson looking at Hawaii's Queen Lili'uokalani (1896), and Susan Castillo's interesting take on the Salem Witchtrials (1692). I skipped around more or less at random in the book, with some titles catching my eye and leading me in. Different articles follow different styles, but there seems to be an energy in the text that I found pleasantly surprising. After all, this is a book which could be assigned, as a burden, to a student, but is intended instead to be read for pleasure.

The negatives? Well, the obvious one is that even with ten times the length, there would be gaps both serious and trivial. The Civil War doesn't seem to get as much coverage as one would think it should. The early sparks of Modernism are scattered between several different essays (1912, 1913, 1922, 1925) which speak to both the importance and the lingering uncertainty as to where the importance lays. Still, this volume offers its 200 essays with the clear view that letting these many flowers bloom is more important than listing all of the flowers of the world.

There's a lot of material in this book, I would confidently say there's something for everyone, and much to discuss with friends and neighbors. (Do folks still do, discuss serious books with their neighbors? Well, at the dinner party at least.) Sarah Vowell connects "American Gothic" with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Discuss. Gish Jen looks at where The Catcher in the Rye lands in the literary canon (with the word "canon" only mentioned once). Discuss.

Here's my recommendation: buy the book, enjoy it, learn something, search online for more information, and make some interesting, odd connections between essays. If you're not convinced yet, read the reviews on Salon, the New York Times, and take a look at the website for the book. Me, I'm off to Hiawatha Falls here in Minneapolis with a new appreciation of Longfellow thanks to David Treuer (1822).

You can't tell a book by its cover. Or can you?
First off, if you really want to know about American literary history, read one of these other books instead:

"A History of American Literature," by Richard Gray (Blackwell, 2004).

"From Puritanism to Postmodernism," by Bradbury and Rulan. (Penguin, 1992).

If you want an unusually readable reference book, try

"The Chronology of American Literature," edited by Daniel S. Burt (Houghton, 2004).

Gray's literary history is truly informative and a fine read, too. It demonstrates a deep and unitary understanding of American Lit on every one of his 800+ pages - all of which he wrote himself, without the help of 200 committee members, as required by Marcus & Sollors. Bradbury & Rulan's work is more concise, and so maybe even better as an intro to the subject.

And now, sadly, to the work at hand.

"Literature," quite frankly, isn't what it's about. As co-editor Greil Marcus (a rock critic by profession) told the N.Y. Times, "We didn't want to call it a *cultural* history because [that's] too trendy." That description would have come closer to the truth, but "too trendy" implies it wouldn't have been taken seriously. Hmmm.

"History" (a narrative that unifies disparate threads) appears to be just a word the publishers (yes, the folks at Harvard's Belknap Press!)feel like using in the title. Nor is it a "reference book," as they also choose to describe it. (It's made up of opinionated essays, not reference material.)

Running through this project like a campus streaker is the essentially anti-intellectual faith that nothing's more important than what's hot. So, on the positive side, if you're looking for 200 readable bits on American culture, with factoids galore, you'll like the book. But if you're interested in a deeper appreciation of American fiction, poetry, and drama (and even film), you may not be quite so pleased. Many of the contributors seem to be chiefly interested in showing how clever they are.

An entire essay, for example, asserts that the plain-as-dirt biography of porn queen Linda Lovelace is a central document of modern American literature. Literary history? Or a gee-whiz editorial move? You be the judge. (Lovelace, BTW, describes her porn career as "slavery" and "torture," but the essayist sees her as a champion of "early feminism." She concludes that Lovelace would be miffed to know her throaty screen work is not now easily rentable.)

It's unfortunate too that one of the most significant novels of the '60s, Heller's "Catch-22," is discussed not by a literary historian but by someone credentialed merely as a "Writer, Brooklyn."

John Picker's full-length essay on "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" is excellent, however, as are a number of others, though their excellence often has nothing to with "literary history."

And that's a big part of the problem.

Did the Vietnam War affect American literature? Apparently not, since the relevant chapter, by a Vietnamese scholar at Hanoi University, focuses on My Lai instead.

How about George W. Bush? Was his response to Hurricane Katrina a moment of profound literary import? What does the "essay" made up of graffiti-like silhouettes inspired by the election of Barack Obama tell us about, say, the actual writings of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, or Malcom X? Yes, they're discussed elsewhere, but the perspective and depth of focus of this "history" are both off, sometimes in very curious ways.

The dust jacket design gives a good idea of what the book is like. Colorful little nuggets, like a tasty breakfast cereal! With lots of sugar, marketing flash, and some actual nutritional value here and there.

The editors have sagely approved trivialization and self-promotion as righteous competition for knowledge and understanding. I give their book two stars (twice what it deserves) because individual parts are sometimes as good (cogent and informative) as the whole pretends to be.