A New Literary History of America

by Greil Marcus, Werner Sollors

Overview

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

ISBN-13:	9780674064102
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	05/07/2012
Series:	Harvard University Press Reference Library Series , #16
Pages:	1128
Sales rank:	428,801
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, 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.

Table of Contents

Timeline

Introduction

Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

1507

The name “America” appears on a map

Toby Lester

1521, August 13

Mexico in America

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

1536, July 24

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Ilan Stavans

1585

“Counterfeited according to the truth”

Michael Gaudio

1607

Fear and love in the Virginia colony

Adam Goodheart

1630

A city upon a hill

Elizabeth Winthrop

1643

A nearer neighbor to the Indians

Ted Widmer

1666, July 10

Anne Bradstreet

Wai Chee Dimock

1670

The American jeremiad

Emory Elliott

1670

The stamp of God’s image

Jason D. LaFountain

1673

The Jesuit relations

Laurent Dubois

1683

Francis Daniel Pastorius

Alfred L. Brophy

1692

The Salem witchcraft trials

Susan Castillo

1693–94, March 4

Edward Taylor

Werner Sollors

1700

Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph

David Blight

1722

Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters

Joyce E. Chaplin

1740

The Great Awakening

Joanne van der Woude

1740s, September 13-14 1814, Yankee Doodle goes to town; Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner

1765, December 23

Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur

Leo Damrosch

1773, September

Phillis Wheatley

Rafia Zafar

1776

The Declaration of Independence

Frank Kelleter

1784, June

Charles Willson Peale

Michael Leja

1787

James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention

Mitchell Meltzer

1787–1790

John Adams, Discourses on Davila

John Diggins

1791

Philip Freneau and The National Gazette

Jefrey L. Pasley

1796

Washington’s farewell address

François Furstenberg

1798

Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts

Nancy Armstrong

1798

American gothic

Marc Amfreville

1801, March 4

Jefferson’s first inaugural address

Jan Ellen Lewis

1804, January

The matter of Haiti

Kaiama Glover

1809

Cupola of the world

Judith Richardson

1819

The Missouri crisis

John Stauffer

1820, November 27

Landscape with birds

Christoph Irmscher

1821

Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary

Lisa Brooks

1821, June 30

Junius Brutus Booth

Coppelia Kahn

1822

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha

David Treuer

1825, November

Thomas Cole and the Hudson River

Alan Wallach

1826, July 4

Songs of the republic

Steve Erickson

1826

Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales

Richard Hutson

1826; 1927

Transnational poetry

Stephen Burt

1827

Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon

Terryl L. Givens

1828

David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles

Tommie Shelby

1830, May 21

Jump Jim Crow

W. T. Lhamon, Jr.

1831, March 5

The Cherokee Nation decision

Philip Deloria

1832, July 10

President Jackson’s bank veto

Dan Feller

1835, January

Democracy in America

Ted Widmer

1835

William Gilmore Simms, The Yemasseee

Jefrey Johnson

1835

The Sacred Harp

Sean Wilentz

1836, February 23–March 6

The Alamo and Texas border writing

Norma E. Cantú

1836, February 28

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

1837, August 31

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

James Conant

1838, July 15

“The Divinity School Address”

Herwig Friedl

1838, September 3

The slave narrative

Caille Millner

1841

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

Robert Clark

1846, June

James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers

Shelley Streeby

1846, late July

Henry David Thoreau

Jonathan Arac

1850

The Scarlet Letter

Bharati Mukherje

1850, July 19

Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement

Lawrence Buell

1850, August 5

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville

Clark Blaise

1851, Moby-Dick

1851

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Beverly Lowry

1852

Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and utopian communities

Winfried Fluck

1852, July 5

Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”

Liam Kennedy

1854, March

Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction

Cindy Weinstein

1855

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Angus Fletcher

1858

The Lincoln-Douglas debates

Michael T. Gilmore

1859

The science of the Indian

Scott Richard Lyons

1861

Emily Dickinson

Susan Stewart

1862, December 13

The journeys of Little Women

Shirley Samuels

1865, March 4

Lincoln’s second inaugural address

Ted Widmer

1865

“Conditions of repose”

Robin Kelsey

1869, March 4

Carl Schurz

Michael Boyden

1872, November 5

All men and women are created equal

Laura Wexler

1875

The Winchester Rifle

Merritt Roe Smith

1876, January 6

Melville in the dark

Kenneth W. Warren

1876, March 10

The art of telephony

Avital Ronell

1878

“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”

Christopher Hookway

1879

John Muir and nature writing

Scott Slovic

1881, January 24

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

Alide Cagidemetrio

1884

Mark Twain’s hairball

Ishmael Red

1884, July

The Linotype machine

Lisa Gitelman

1884, November

The Southwest imagined

Leah Dilworth

1885

The problem of error

James Conant

1885, July

Limits to violence

James Dawes

1885, October

Writing New Orleans

Andrei Codrescu

1888, The introduction of motion pictures

1889, August 28

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Yael Schacher

1893

Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature

David Treuer

1895

Ida B. Wells, A Red Record

Jacqueline Goldsby

1896

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life

Judith Jackson Fossett

1896, September 6

Queen Lili‘uokalani

Rob Wilson

1897, Memorial Day

The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument

Richard Powers

1898, June 22

Literature and imperialism

Amy Kaplan

1899; 1924

McTeague and Greed

Gilberto Perez

1900

Henry Adams

T. J. Jackson Lears

1900

The Wizard of Oz

Gerald Early

1900; 1905

Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth

Farah Jasmine Grifin

1901

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition

John Edgar Wideman

1901-1903, The problem of the color line

1903, May 5

“The real American has not yet arrived”

Aviva Taubenfeld

1903

The invention of the blues

Luc Sante

1903

One sees what one sees

Daniel Albright

1904, August 30

Henry James in America

Ross Posnock

1905, October 15

Little Nemo in Slumberland

Katherine Roeder

1906, April 9

The Azusa Street revival

R. J. Smith

1906, April 18 , 5:14 a.m.

The San Francisco Earthquake

Kathleen Moran

1911

“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”

Philip Furia

1912, April 15

Lifeboats cut adrift

Alan Ackerman

1912

The lure of impossible things

Heather Love

1912

Tarzan begins his reign

Gerald Early

1913

A modernist moment

Bonnie Costello

1915

D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation

Richard Schickel

1915

Robert Frost

Christian Wiman

1917

The philosopher and the millionaire

Richard J. Bernstein

1920, August 10

Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”

Daphne A. Brooks

1921

Jean Toomer

Elizabeth Alexander

1922

T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence

Anita Patterson

October 1923, Chaplinesque

1924

F. O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney

Robert Polito

1924, May 26

The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature

Yael Schacher

1925

The Great Gatsby

Lan Tran

1925, June

Sinclair Lewis

Jefrey Ferguson

1925, July

The Scopes trial

Michael Kazin

1925, August 16

Dorothy Parker

Catherine Keyser

1926

Fire!!

Carla Kaplan

1926

Hardboiled

Walter Mosley

1926

The Book-of-the-Month Club

Joan Shelley Rubin

1927

Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag

Paul Muldoon

1927, May 16

“Free to develop their faculties”

Jefrey Rosen

1928, April 8, Easter Sunday

Dilsey Gibson goes to church

Werner Sollors

1928, Summer

John Dos Passos

Phoebe Kosman

1928, November 18

The mouse that whistled

Karal Ann Marling

1930

“You're swell!”

Robert Gottlieb

1930, March

The Silent Enemy

Micah Treuer

October 1930, Grant Wood's American Gothic"

1931, March 19

Nevada legalizes gambling

David Thomson

1932

Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters

Anthony Grafton

Editorial Reviews

In hardcover, this mammoth collection of original essays impressed reviewers and general readers with the breadth and depth of its contributions. In fact, its 1128 pages cover a dizzying variety of topics far more extensive than previous literary histories; from colonial ethnic strife and antebellum literary battles to Citizen Kane, country music, the atomic bomb, and Thomas Pynchon. And the match-up of writers and subjects easily qualifies as irresistible: Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams; Gerald Early on Tarzan; Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic; Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction; Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter; Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg. Now in paperback.

— Tim Flannigan

One way to reinvigorate our opinions about the nation's literary life is to encounter new ways to think about it. A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors does just that with a wide-ranging collection of essays.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Bob Hoover

It's weirdly inclusive (Is the Winchester Rifle really part of literary history?), but the big book has so many lively entries, on everything from hard-boiled fiction to New Journalism, that you can overlook its faults and enjoy its sweep.

San Diego Union-Tribune - Robert L. Pincus

Never fails to engross and edify.

Christian Century - Rodney Clapp

A New Literary History of America...avoids the temptation to rein in its subject too neatly or ease the strangeness out of American history. Not only does it stretch, appropriately, to America's earliest pre-history—the first essay, by Toby Lester, examines the first appearance of "America" on a map—this enormous anthology stretches the definition of literary...A New Literary History of America challenges not only its own structure, but also our traditional view of history's structure in order to emphasize the transmission, conscious or collectively unconscious, of ideas...But the pleasure of the volume, of course, is the massive collection of voices it brings together, subjects and authors both.

popmatters.com - Robert Loss

This book came out only last year and has already proved itself indispensable. If I'm writing about anything that has to do with American literature, I look it up here first. The format is a little unwieldy—the book is organized chronologically around idiosyncratically chosen dates—but its capsule essays build into a surprising, inventive narrative of American culture: Ishamel Reed on "Mark Twain's hairball", Luc Sante on the blues, David Thomson on Chaplin, Ruth Wisse on Saul Bellow, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer....I could quibble with the omissions, or I could just shut up and be grateful that this book exists in any form.

National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors blog - Ruth Franklin

Who would want to go into this particular new year, with all its uncertainties, without a copy of A New Literary History of America? Many hands delight and inform, and "literary history" is time stuffed full of "cultural creations" like this perfect bedside book. The selections are short, written with both precision and passion, and not infrequently deliver insights.

Providence Journal - Tom D'Evelyn

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

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.

Wall Street Journal - Wes Davis

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.

New York Times - Patricia Cohen

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 needs to tell us what the facts mean, and A New Literary History does just that.

Salon - Laura Miller

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.

Entertainment Weekly online - Ken Tucker

[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.

Boston Globe Brainiac blog - Christopher Shea

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.

Booklist - Donna Seaman

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.

Cleveland Plain Dealer - Ron Antonucci

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.

Boston Examiner - Michelle Kerns

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.

Arts Fuse - Bill Marx

A wildly informative, hugely entertaining and sometimes even revelatory book.

Buffalo News - Jeff Simon

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.

San Diego Union-Tribune - Robert Pincus

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.

New York Review of Books - Larry McMurtry

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.

Washington Times - Bruce Allen

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.

Dallas Morning News - Chris Vognar

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.

npr.org - John McAlley

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.

Times Literary Supplement - Jill Lepore

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...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.

BookPage - Lacey Galbraith

This brick of a book is a browser's delight. Ranging over many high points and exploring interesting crannies of the American experience from 1507 to 2008, A New Literary History offers those interested in culture, history, and politics much to savor and more than a little with which to match wits. Among those entries bringing fresh insight to seemingly exhausted subjects are Ted Widmer on Roger Williams and Abraham Lincoln, Greil Marcus on Moby-Dick, Anita Patterson on T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, and Charles Taylor juxtaposing with great verve JFK's inaugural with Catch-22. There are virtuoso explanations: Anthony Grafton on Edmund Wilson's The American Earthquake, Dave Hickey on Hank Williams's transformation of the American song in country music, and Monica Miller on the transcendental meaning of Zora Neale Thurston's denunciation of Brown v. The Board of Education. Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer is a stylistic tour de force...This ambitious anthology succeeds beyond reasonable expectations in satisfying what Lionel Trilling...said was "the moral obligation to be intelligent."

Boston Phoenix - Peter Kadzis

[The editors] tell an equally fascinating and moving history of the country, as we have never heard it before—and a story like which, say the editors, would not be possible in any other country...Instead of blending into the background of different shades of gray of a historical order, each of the events here radiates with seemingly contemporary luminosity.

Suddeutsche Zeitung - Jörg Häntzschel

A DIY college course unto itself.

East Bay Express - Anneli Rufus

An impressive achievement.

San Antonio Express-News - Jim Kiest

[An] original new history of literature...A New Literary History of America recounts the history of the mind of a continent, and each single subject is approached with stylistic verve and thus knighted as literature by its authors, many of whom are themselves writers...Even though an idiosyncratic sprint across half a millennium of cultural history cannot avoid certain abbreviations, this amusing-to-read anthology teaches us that what appears to get more and more lost in this age of Wikipedia: well-researched, reflective, subjective and stylistically brilliant approaches that transform facts and figures into knowledge that can be passed on.

Neue Zurcher Zeitung - Andrea Köhler

This may be called a literary history but it is more broadly a cultural history, a history of language in its many forms—novels, essays, plays, public speeches and private letters, sermons and on and on...The choices made by the editors are smart, and the writers of the essays engage ideas with great passion.

Chicago Tribune - Elizabeth Taylor

Brings together a series of disconnected, personal (and often very opinionated) essays that not only offer new angles on the big names of U.S. literature but also consider Alcoholics Anonymous, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Citizen Kane, Dr. Seuss, skyscrapers, and Superman.

Times Higher Education - Matthew Reisz

It's hard to imagine anyone right up to full professor failing to get excitement from this charged grid of event and interpretation...Hats off, though, to the editors above all, for constructing a volume where each element reinforces every other, often by contradicting it, so that the whole vast book is more exciting than even its most impressive part.

The Observer - Adam Mars-Jones

[An] essential, eclectic doorstop anthology.

New York Magazine

Hundreds of essayists write short, but think expansively on just about everything that makes us who we are—from Elvis to Obama.

Entertainment Weekly

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

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

[This] may be the most unique attempt yet to tell the story of the United States...It's a feast for anyone who cares about history and national identity, not to mention a showcase for virtuoso writing.

avclub.com

A collection of great minds writing on other great minds, art and literature, social movements, feats of scholarship and everything in between.

San Francisco Chronicle

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.)

Publishers Weekly

Marcus (Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music) and Sollors (English & Afro-American studies, Harvard) 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. The editors include over 200 chronologically arranged essays, original to this volume and including Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Paula Rabinowitz on FDR's first fireside chat, David Treuer on Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, Michael Tolkin on Alcoholics Anonymous, and Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg. The editors selected the entries from a pool of over 400 essays, requiring that each deal with a turning point, a new question, or a time when "what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable." VERDICT 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 of Congress

Library Journal

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

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

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

[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

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

A wildly informative, hugely entertaining and sometimes even revelatory book.
— Jeff Simon

Buffalo News

It's weirdly inclusive (Is the Winchester Rifle really part of literary history?), but the big book has so many lively entries, on everything from hard-boiled fiction to New Journalism, that you can overlook its faults and enjoy its sweep.
— Robert L. Pincus

San Diego Union-Tribune

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book came out only last year and has already proved itself indispensable. If I'm writing about anything that has to do with American literature, I look it up here first. The format is a little unwieldy—the book is organized chronologically around idiosyncratically chosen dates—but its capsule essays build into a surprising, inventive narrative of American culture: Ishamel Reed on "Mark Twain's hairball", Luc Sante on the blues, David Thomson on Chaplin, Ruth Wisse on Saul Bellow, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer....I could quibble with the omissions, or I could just shut up and be grateful that this book exists in any form.
— Ruth Franklin

National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors blog

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...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

Book Page

Brings together a series of disconnected, personal (and often very opinionated) essays that not only offer new angles on the big names of U.S. literature but also consider Alcoholics Anonymous, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Citizen Kane, Dr. Seuss, skyscrapers, and Superman.
— Matthew Reisz

Times Higher Education

It's hard to imagine anyone right up to full professor failing to get excitement from this charged grid of event and interpretation...Hats off, though, to the editors above all, for constructing a volume where each element reinforces every other, often by contradicting it, so that the whole vast book is more exciting than even its most impressive part.
— Adam Mars-Jones

The Observer

Who would want to go into this particular new year, with all its uncertainties, without a copy of A New Literary History of America? Many hands delight and inform, and "literary history" is time stuffed full of "cultural creations" like this perfect bedside book. The selections are short, written with both precision and passion, and not infrequently deliver insights.
— Tom D'Evelyn

Providence Journal

One way to reinvigorate our opinions about the nation's literary life is to encounter new ways to think about it. A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors does just that with a wide-ranging collection of essays.
— Bob Hoover

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Never fails to engross and edify.
— Rodney Clapp

Christian Century

A New Literary History of America...avoids the temptation to rein in its subject too neatly or ease the strangeness out of American history. Not only does it stretch, appropriately, to America's earliest pre-history—the first essay, by Toby Lester, examines the first appearance of "America" on a map—this enormous anthology stretches the definition of literary...A New Literary History of America challenges not only its own structure, but also our traditional view of history's structure in order to emphasize the transmission, conscious or collectively unconscious, of ideas...But the pleasure of the volume, of course, is the massive collection of voices it brings together, subjects and authors both.
— Robert Loss

popmatters.com

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

This brick of a book is a browser's delight. Ranging over many high points and exploring interesting crannies of the American experience from 1507 to 2008, A New Literary History offers those interested in culture, history, and politics much to savor and more than a little with which to match wits. Among those entries bringing fresh insight to seemingly exhausted subjects are Ted Widmer on Roger Williams and Abraham Lincoln, Greil Marcus on Moby-Dick, Anita Patterson on T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, and Charles Taylor juxtaposing with great verve JFK's inaugural with Catch-22. There are virtuoso explanations: Anthony Grafton on Edmund Wilson's The American Earthquake, Dave Hickey on Hank Williams's transformation of the American song in country music, and Monica Miller on the transcendental meaning of Zora Neale Thurston's denunciation of Brown v. The Board of Education. Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer is a stylistic tour de force...This ambitious anthology succeeds beyond reasonable expectations in satisfying what Lionel Trilling...said was "the moral obligation to be intelligent."
— Peter Kadzis

Boston Phoenix

[The editors] tell an equally fascinating and moving history of the country, as we have never heard it before—and a story like which, say the editors, would not be possible in any other country...Instead of blending into the background of different shades of gray of a historical order, each of the events here radiates with seemingly contemporary luminosity.
— Jörg Häntzschel

Süddeutsche Zeitung

A DIY college course unto itself.
— Anneli Rufus

East Bay Express

An impressive achievement.
— Jim Kiest

San Antonio Express-News

[An] original new history of literature...A New Literary History of America recounts the history of the mind of a continent, and each single subject is approached with stylistic verve and thus knighted as literature by its authors, many of whom are themselves writers...Even though an idiosyncratic sprint across half a millennium of cultural history cannot avoid certain abbreviations, this amusing-to-read anthology teaches us that what appears to get more and more lost in this age of Wikipedia: well-researched, reflective, subjective and stylistically brilliant approaches that transform facts and figures into knowledge that can be passed on.
— Andrea Köhler

Neue Zürcher Zeitung

This may be called a literary history but it is more broadly a cultural history, a history of language in its many forms—novels, essays, plays, public speeches and private letters, sermons and on and on...The choices made by the editors are smart, and the writers of the essays engage ideas with great passion.
— Elizabeth Taylor

Chicago Tribune

Who would want to go into this particular new year, with all its uncertainties, without a copy of A New Literary History of America? Many hands delight and inform, and "literary history" is time stuffed full of "cultural creations" like this perfect bedside book. The selections are short, written with both precision and passion, and not infrequently deliver insights.

Providence Journal - Tom D'evelyn

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