The Auburn Conference

by Tom Piazza

Overview

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609388812
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	05/01/2023
Pages:	199
Sales rank:	121,392
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Tom Piazza’s twelve books include the novels A Free State and City of Refuge, the story collection Blues and Trouble, and his nonfiction work Why New Orleans Matters. He was a principal writer for the HBO series Treme, and lives in New Orleans.


 

Editorial Reviews

The mother of all writers’ conferences. Piazza doesn't force anything, and he doesn't miss a trick.”—Roy Blount Jr.
 

“The Auburn Conference is a brilliant imagining of an 1883 writers’ conference with Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and other luminaries as characters. This august round table in Upstate New York grapples with the fate of American democracy and what constitutes literature. The dialogue imagined by Piazza—especially his treatment of Harriet Beecher Stowe—is dazzling. Piazza conjures a distant era that eerily translates to our own broken and troubled times. This is an epic novel by one of America’s greatest writers.”—Douglas Brinkley
 

“Who wouldn’t want to go to this conference?”—Greil Marcus
 

“An unexpected combination of wit, passion, and intellect that lands with tremendous relevance.”—Mary Gaitskill
 

“Tom Piazza has gathered the nation’s most renowned writers in response to a provocative question: ‘What is an American?’ These four words posed by a character in the aftermath of the Civil War, resound today with such perfect timing. Through this tantalizing dialogue, the past interrogates the present and future, and we cannot play innocent or uninformed. To read The Auburn Conference is to be there, listening, raising one’s hand, nodding one’s head, or even rising to one’s feet in protest or applause.”—Yusef Komunyakaa
 

“What do Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain discuss over brandy and cigars? What gets Emily Dickinson out of the house? The Auburn Conference is an ebullient work of loving homage, pitch-perfect ventriloquism, and drawing-room farce that unfolds into an examination of grand American questions: What, finally, is America? And does it deserve to be saved?”—Nathaniel Rich
 

“The Auburn Conference is a display of intellectual pyrotechnics, a fictional nineteenth-century writers’ conference in which modern and historical observations abound on literature, celebrity, and ego, culminating in a grand debate over slavery, women’s suffrage, and the American ideal. Both witty and intellectually acute, this is a powerful novel.”—Roxana Robinson
 

“Lauded novelist and music writer Piazza’s bravura satire and fluent literary ventriloquism are razor sharp and hilarious, while the feuds he orchestrates over freedom, the Constitution, race, women’s rights, democracy, art, and the predominance of lies over truth are all too timely.”—Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher

. . . there is much richness and enjoyment to be found in the conversations that Piazza imagines between these great authors as they drink and debate. . . . There is a great deal of thinking going on in The Auburn Conference, yet Piazza still makes all this thinking exciting to read, and he deftly paints the areas of gray in the life of the writer, particularly the nonconformist one."

Southern Review of Books

2023-02-23
An 1883 writers’ conference raises questions still roiling 21st-century America.

Frederick Olmstead Matthews, a junior lecturer at the moss-grown Auburn Collegiate Institute in upstate New York, has tried to get more contemporary American books into the tired literature curriculum, but he “could as well have suggested installing a porcupine as the Institute’s president.” Matthews manages to convince the provost who bankrolls the institute that “a public conversation about the future of America” among Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass will enhance the prestige of the institute, the town, and—not so incidentally—the social-climbing provost. By the time the conference begins, Matthews has reluctantly added a former Confederate general and a bestselling female author to the roster, which prompts a local journalist to invite suffragists and supporters of the Lost Cause to attend in the hopes that they will stir up trouble so the journalist’s lurid coverage can get him into the pages of a big-city newspaper. He hardly needed to bother: Hilarious scenes of the conference’s early sessions show Whitman showboating and Twain giving his standard after-dinner speech while Douglass and Melville valiantly try to raise real questions about the darker aspects of American life and Stowe rolls her eyes over the idiocy of the entire gathering. Stoked by racist comments from the former Confederate and Douglass’ angry protests, the final discussion ends in a full-scale riot. Along the way, Piazza lets the bestselling female novelist make some cogent points about the value of domestic fiction and shows Douglass to be weary of his public role as the representative of his race. The intriguing mix of humor and underlying seriousness makes this an engaging change of pace for an author better known for his writings on music and New Orleans. An overall lack of focus, however, is signaled by occasional appearances to no evident purpose of an unnamed conference attendee clearly identifiable as Emily Dickinson.

Readable and entertaining, though the scattering of provocative ideas never quite coheres into a satisfying whole.

Kirkus Reviews

Piazza doesn’t force anything, and he doesn’t miss a trick.”

Roy Blount Jr.