★ INTRODUCTION

A literary history of America? Leafing through these pages, a reader will find en- tries on Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Mel- ville, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison, but also on Stephen Foster, the invention of the telephone, the Winchester rifle, Steamboat Willie, Al- coholics Anonymous, Porgy and Bess, the first issue ofLife, the atomic bomb, Jack- son Pollock’s drip paintings, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” Alfred Hitch- cock’s Psycho, and Ronald Reagan’s 1964 campaign speech for Barry Goldwater.

“All of you know the Doom Story, handed down . . . How just after this world began, the tall forefathers, white as snow, knew a magic to build all kinds of great things. And how the shadow people came from another place. So black that nobody ever saw their faces. Then the fearsome fight­ing when the shadows tried to keep the sun from rising and make it always night. “You know the story as well as I do—how all the forefather things were ruined even though the shadows died. Then the long sickness and starving time when just a few of the forefather children lived in the woods. That’s the old story.”

So says a woman in Robie Macauley’s novel A Secret History of Time to Come, published in 1979. The woman is offering an after-­the-­flood myth of origins, and like most such myths, this one has its core of truth: what she is describing, per- haps two hundred years after the fact, is a full-­scale race war that broke out in the United States near the end of the twentieth century. Before all black people were exterminated, the struggle paralyzed the country and disrupted the international balance of power, leading the Soviet ­Union to launch an attack on China—this being, in Macauley’s telling, history, not myth, entries from the journal of a black revolutionary that Macauley scatters through the first pages of his book. “The white ones left went to sleep,” says another handed-down-­ ­tale teller, “and then, waking up the next morning, had forgotten all they had ever known.” Macauley was an editor at the Kenyon Review, Playboy, and Hough­ton Mif­flin; he died in 1995. This was his only novel. In his secret history, America is again a wilderness: there are scattered settlements, recalling the backward frontier clear- ings of the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. In some places, people can read and write; in others they have regressed almost beyond speech. Artifacts—ruined buildings, roads, random books treated as the iconic library of the forgotten country (the trea­sured shelf of one settlement: Home Radio Repair, Lawrence Welk:  INTRODUCTION xxii

The Man and His Music, Ben-­Hur, Practical Accounting, Learn to Invest Wisely, Short- hand Made Easy: The Gregg System, Caring for Your Parakeet, The Songs of Stephen Foster)—survive, but the connections between them are all gone. “We used to sit around and the old folks would tell us the story of how we came here”—like the story of the Lost White Boy, encountered in the forest by a band of freed slaves journeying north in 1867 to found a town, and how one leader, who only saw the light in others’ eyes, wanted the boy guided back to his people, while another, who only saw the dark, wanted the group to point the boy in the right direction, pick up stakes, and run. As Colson Whitehead, born in 1969, tells the tale in Apex Hides the Hurt, his third novel, published in 2006, the first course was followed: “The Niggers found me,” the boy says when he’s safe at home. His guide flees, the rest of the company as soon as they see him coming, and, as the story has been passed down the generations, always in the voice of a woman who was there, “When we looked back, all the horizon was lit up as if by a giant bon- fire. We knew they had set fire to what remained at our camp, and had we tarried, we would have been ash.” “There was always that kindling problem of being black in America,” Whitehead’s unnamed hero, a young nomenclature consultant, brought in to rename the town, says, “—namely, how to avoid becoming it.” Abraham Goode, a patriarch who was one of the leaders of the original four- teen black families, and William Field, who had lost his own family in slavery, were the Light and the Dark: “My favorite dynamic duo founding fathers,” says the name man. “He recognized them as a common business pair: a marketing, vi- sion guy teamed up with a bottom-­line, numbers guy.” In a diary kept by Goode’s daughter, the consultant finds, Goode was “the optimist-prophet­ type, quick on the draw with a pick-­me-­up from the Bible and a reminder of their rights as Amer- ican citizens”; Field “turned out to be the downer-­realist fig­ure, handy with a ‘this stretch of the river is too treacherous to cross’ and ‘it is best we not tarry here past sundown.’ His perspective may have been overcast, but from the diary, it seemed that Field had a knack for being right. The Lost White Boy Incident was a good example.” The town they made was called Freedom—Goode’s choice (That’ll bring ’em in!), winning out over Field’s Struggle (Hey, Bill, why not go all the way and call it Suffering?)—until the white barbed-­wire manufacturer Sterling Winthrop showed up, and, with Goode’s vote against Field’s ( Jobs! New schools! And I won’t drive you off your land!), had the settlement renamed for himself, not to mention an- other of America’s founding fathers. Over time, the city divided itself by race; the consultant finds himself “in the Winthrop Suite of the Hotel Winthrop on Win- throp Street in Winthrop Square in the Town of Winthrop in Winthrop County,” and the fact that the town was found, made up, made by black people is a whisper in the night. But the century has turned: Lucky Aberdeen, a software millionaire back in his hometown, wants to remake the place in his own image as New Prospera. The mayor, Regina Goode, descendant of Abraham, wants to go back to Freedom. Al- bie Winthrop, the last of his line, is holding on to Winthrop as if it’s the only proof of his existence. So the pro from New York arrives to settle the matter: xxiii INTRODUCTION 

“His contract called for his clients to keep the name he gave them for one year. Who knew? They might even come to like it. Recognize it as their own. Grow as comfortable with it as if it were their very skin.” For him, the act of naming is the act of founding, of making, even of discovery. Names are where his mind goes; anything he sees or hears takes him in an instant to a new brand, a different spin, a whole world changed by an adjective. “He’d al- ways had a soft spot for Amerigo Vespucci, who got lost while looking for the In- dies and hit nomenclature’s Big Kahuna instead . . . He ­couldn’t argue with Amer- ica. It was one of those balloon names. It kept stretching as it filled up, getting bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner. What kind of gas it was, stretching the thing to its limits, who could say. Whatever we dreamed. And of course one day it would pop. But for now, it served its purpose. For now, it was holding together.” There, then, are two literary histories of America: made-up­ histories, as Amer- ica was made up, as its historical story has always stood, from its first steps, as a temptation to the imagination. As America is made up out of nothing, it can van- ish in an instant. “The story of Rip Van Winkle has never been finished,”­ Con- stance Rourke wrote in 1931, but Robie Macauley’s America is Rip Van Winkle in reverse: when they woke up, they had forgotten that the country had ever been. As America is a story of discovery and founding, it can be rediscovered and re- founded at any time: “As he fell asleep,” Whitehead writes of his consultant after he makes his decision, “he heard the conversations they will have. Ones that will get to the heart of this mess. The sick swollen heart of this land. They will say: I was born in Struggle. I live in Struggle and come from Struggle.” And yet, as both fables make as plain as the line that divides day from night—that is, as the one fades into the other—America was made up out of crime, sin, and, as the country found the words to name its mission, violation, a rebuke to its own professed ide- als. As America was made, it can be unmade; with slavery, it was unmade as it was made. Macauley’s and Whitehead’s literary histories share two questions: Does America even exist? Should it? All the names that appear above, fictional and real, Dickinson and Steamboat Willie, Porgy and Bess and Philip Roth, the Light and the Dark, push this drama forward.

In 1989 Harvard published A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier, and in 2004 A New History of German Literature, edited by David Well- bery; this book represents an entirely different sort of challenge. The earlier proj­ ects began in the eighth century and moved forward to trace the organic litera- tures of organic soci­ ­e­ties that long preceded the emergence of the modern French and German nations. A New Literary History of America begins early in the six- teenth century; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dominate the story it tells, and this is the story of a made-up­ nation that in many ways preceded its so- ciety. Its literature was not inherited but invented, as if it were a tool or a ma- chine, and discovered, as if it were a gold strike or the next wonder of the Louisi- ana Purchase. No tradition has ever ruled; no form has ever been fixed; American history, literary, social, political, religious, cultural, and technological, has been a matter of what one could make of it, and of how one got across what he or she  INTRODUCTION xxiv

meant to say to his or her fellow citizens, as they no less than the speaker strug- gled to de­fine themselves as individuals, and as part of a whole. This book is a reexamination of the American experience as seen through a literary glass, where what is at issue is speech, in many forms. Throughout, the search has been for points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable. The goal of the book is not to smash a canon or create a new one, but to set many forms of American speech in motion, so that different forms, and people speak- ing at different times in sometimes radically different ways, can be heard speak- ing to each other. Thus this broadly cultural history—a history of America in which literary means not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is ex- pressed, what is invented, in whatever form. The focus is on the whole range of all those things that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it: poems, novels, plays, and essays, but also maps, histories, and travel diaries, sermons and religious tracts, public speeches and private letters, political polemics, addresses, and debates, Supreme Court decisions, literary histories and criticism, folk songs, magazines, dramatic performances, the blues, philosophy, paintings and monu- ments, jazz, war memorials, museums, book clubs, photographs, comic strips and comic books, country music, films, radio, rock and roll, cartoons, musicals, and hip-­hop: “Made in America.” “Made in America”—America, made. In many ways, the story that ­comes to- gether in the pieces of this book is that of people taking up the two elemental American fables—the fable of discovery and the fable of founding—and making their own versions: their own versions of the fables, which is to say their own ver- sions of America itself. Who knows if it is John F. Kennedy delivering his Inaugu- ral Address or Jay Gatsby throwing one more party who is more truly invoking John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” from three centuries before? Is it Frederick Douglass or Hank Williams who has the most to tell us, not to men- tion Jefferson’s ghost, about the real meaning of the Declaration of Inde­pen­ dence? ­Doesn’t Emily Dickinson, within her own Amherst walls, invent as com- plete a nation—loose in the wilderness in flight from all forms of restraint, be they those of God or man—as Ahab on the quarterdeck or Lincoln at the East Face of the Capitol? Deep cultural obsessions and passing fads rooted in deep cultural obsessions— or resulting in them—creations that have traveled around the world and those that have remained local—only to be sought to their roots by people from all over the world—are taken up in more than two hundred essays commissioned and newly written for this book. The contributors were asked for their own argu- ments, their own points of view, their own embraces and dissents: to surprise not only their editors, or their readers, but themselves. The essays map their own ter- ritory and stake out their own ground, generating unexpected threads of infor- mation and startling claims that move the story on—forward, and doubling back, the twentieth century longing for the ideals of the seventeenth, the past plotting its revenge on the corruptions of the future. xxv INTRODUCTION 

From the first appearance of the word “America” on a map to Jimi Hendrix’s rewrite of the national anthem, from Anne Bradstreet to Maya Lin, from Samuel Sewall to Saul Bellow, from Father Marquette to Jelly Roll Morton, from Se- quoyah to Susan B. Anthony, from Margaret Fuller to Charlie Parker, from “Yan- kee Doodle” to Yusef Komunyakaa, A New Literary History of America takes the reader through the matrix of American culture. Asking if Linda Lovelace belongs in this book alongside Louisa May Alcott is taking a chance; sitting around the table, the editors rolled the dice, and, months later, when the writer asked to make good on the bet delivered her work, the dice came up sevens. In the pages of this book readers may encounter such means of transportation as the ships Arbella and Phillis as well as the train that took Carrie Meeber from Wisconsin to Chicago, contemplate images from Virginia watercolors and Audu- bon’s birds to Little Nemo in Slumberland and conceptual art, or find themselves in places as different from each other as the Cherokee Nation and Corinthian Hall, Crèvecoeur’s farm and the Nuyorican Poets Café, John Muir’s Alaska and Nor- man Bates’s motel. Some technological inventions had deep cultural roots and others had long-lasting­ cultural consequences, and this book moves from indus- trial beauty to skyscrapers to cybernetics. There is a certain balance between old and new, and the reader will find Wash- ington Irving as well as Charlie Chaplin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as well as Walt Whitman, Uncle Tom as well as Ursa Corregidora, Nate Shaw as well as Mal- colm X, Henry Adams as well as Queen Lili’uokalani, Mark Twain as well as Chief Simon Pokagon, Carl Sandburg as well as Wallace Stevens, John Steinbeck as well as Zora Neale Hurston. The most accomplished writers share these pages with popular authors they hardly would have admired. Between the covers of this book, Henry James finds himself in bed with Edgar Rice Burroughs; Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! must share not only the book’s pages but its own entry with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Read in pairs, various essays bridge what were once considered unbridgeable cultural gulfs (T. S. Eliot and Mickey Mouse) and present contrary political and aesthetic options in peaceful coexistence (Wil- liam F. Buckley and Seymour Hersh, or Harry S. Truman and Vladimir Nabokov); single entries may combine a historical moment with a specific­ writer ( Jack Lon- don and the San Francisco earthquake), a book and a visual artist (The Grapes of Wrath as illustrated by Thomas Hart Benton), or a car manufacturer and a mural- ist (Henry Ford and Diego Rivera). Some writers for this book were inspired by D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Constance Rourke, Edmund Wilson, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, John Kouwenhoven, C. L. R. James, and Leslie Fiedler (and some of these pio- neering and persistent examiners of American culture are also subjects of entries), or by the Minnesota Writers Pamphlets, and it is hoped that the reader will find A New Literary History of America entertaining as well as informative. There are numerous novelists, poets, playwrights, and screenwriters among the contribu- tors, including Elizabeth Alexander (on Jean Toomer), Clark Blaise (on Haw- thorne and Melville), David Bradley (on Malcolm X), Sarah Shun-lien­ Bynum (on Edmund White), Norma Cantú (on the siege of the Alamo), Robert Clark (on Ed-  INTRODUCTION xxvi

gar Allan Poe), Joshua Clover (on Bob Dylan), Andrei Codrescu (on New Orleans), Steve Erickson (on Stephen Foster), Mark Ford (on Frank O’Hara), Mary Gaitskill (on Norman Mailer), Gish Jen (on The Catcher in the Rye), Jonathan Lethem (on Thomas Edison), Douglas McGrath (on Preston Sturges), Maureen McLane (on Adrienne Rich), Walter Mosley (on detective fiction), Bharati Mukherjee (onThe Scarlet Letter), Paul Muldoon (on Carl Sandburg), Richard Powers (on the Shaw Memorial), Ishmael Reed (on Huckleberry Finn), Peter Sacks (on Robert Lowell), Stephen Schiff (on Lolita), Susan Stewart (on Emily Dickinson), Michael Tolkin (on Alcoholics Anonymous), Lan Tran (on The Great Gatsby), John Wideman (on Charles Chesnutt), Rob Wilson (on Queen Lili‘uokalani), Christian Wiman (on Robert Frost), and Elizabeth Winthrop (on John Winthrop). The par­tic­i­pa­tion of artists—including Kara Walker, on the election of Barack Obama—sets a tone that distinguishes this book from many others devoted to American culture. Nu- merous essays were contributed by academics and unaffiliated writers in the United States as well as other countries, from a great vari­ ­ety of fields, typically from the vantage point not of a specialist but of an enthusiast, a skeptic, a digger, a reader, a listener, a viewer: from the vantage point of a cultural citizen, where, as writers accepted their assignments, the work of African Americans is the heritage of Jewish Americans, and speaking for Edith Wharton may be someone who would never have spoken in her pages. In all cases the wish was to arouse the reader’s curiosity, to open questions, not to close cases: to examine the first post-­ Columbian Americans as if for the first time, to take on more proximate ances- tors as if they were still present and able to answer back. The essays are arranged in a chronological order, for it is history that has given shape to these cultural creations, and the chronology also provides a first orienta- tion to the reader, anchoring the many examples of creativity in time over the span of five centuries—and there are leaps across time and territory where it may not be obvious just where a particular anchor has been thrown. If the great major- ity of the entries date from 1865 and after, it is not only because, as a matter of numbers, the American population has increased so dramatically from that time; beginning with the second wave of Irish immigration in the mid-nineteenth­ cen- tury, the story of the United States becomes­ a story of previously disenfranchised, despised, degraded, excluded, enslaved, brutalized, and even unspeakable Ameri- cans claiming their place as full citizens, demanding not only the right to speak but the right to be heard, remaking the country as surely as any before them, and, in novels, poems, paintings, speeches, and acts, judging it as it had never been judged before. And it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the world took notice of American literature, voices, expression. A New Literary History of America can be read in many other ways than in its chronological order: the reader might select entries from the table of contents or from the headlines that appear in front of each essay, or read all those entries to- gether first that the index tells us mention, say, Lincoln or Whitman. Even though there is no party line in this book, and different, at times truly contradictory per- spectives emerge, we hope that reading more and more essays will generate a new and fresh sense of America. Together these essays illuminate the religious and he- xxvii INTRODUCTION  retical impulses in the culture, its gothic and paranoid scenarios, its democratic promise, its slave narrative and persistent, though ever-­changing issue of race, its Western and captivity narrative, its children’s literature, the power of its senti- mentalism, its love for the success story and its faith in self-­improvement, its hard­boiled speech, its immigrant autobiography, its science fiction, its investiga- tive reporting, and its tension between bursts of freewheeling creativity and re- pression, between experimentation and orthodoxy, between censorship and the broad laughter at any restraint. Gun culture and reform movements, hopes for regeneration and doomsday fears, loud exaggeration and quiet inwardness have been equally at home in America. It is the task of this book to remind the reader of what is most familiar and to raise the specter of what remains out of sight— forgotten, suppressed, or biding its time. There is no attempt to give every­ name its due, to visit ev­ery state or the era of ev­ery presidency, only the hope that the essays gathered here might be so sugges- tive as to invite the reader to think of countless other moments in the American story that could be addressed as this book tries to speak to its subjects.

The imaginative energy and activist editorial par­tic­i­pa­tion of Lindsay Waters, the perpetuum mobile of Harvard University Press, were the true engines of this book. When Stephen Burt, Gerald Early, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Hua Hsu, Michael Leja, David Mindell, Yael Schacher, David Thomson, David Treuer, Ted Widmer, and Sean Wilentz, the members of the editorial board of A New Literary History of America, proposed more than four hundred entries and then helped whittle the list down to those that appear here, they gave the book its shape; when they not only commissioned authors, reviewed and edited incoming essays, but also wrote essays of their own, they gave it their own im- print. Drew Faust and Phyllis Strimling at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study generously supported the project­ early on with an Exploratory Seminar that served as a series of brainstorming sessions among scholars and writers, many of whom later joined the editorial board, and with an Advanced Seminar that brought members of the board together again at a time when about half the en- tries had come in. William Sisler, the director of Harvard University Press, sup- ported the venture from its inception and made possible another editorial board meeting at the Press of­fices. Phoebe Kosman, whose probing and energetic edi- torial oversight kept the endeavor on its course, also contributed an essay; Seo-­ Young Chu jumped into the editing fray at the halfway mark, provided much edi- torial help, and also contributed her own entry; Thomas Dichter and Kelsey LeBuffe provided research assistance; Jack Hamilton helped with proofreading; the indefatigable Julie Hagen copyedited the manuscript from first to last; Jenni- fer Snodgrass brought the ship into port. We could not have asked for better col- leagues. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

A New Literary History of America