The Literary Guide to the United States ed. by Stewart Benedict

Abstract

288 Western American Literature asphalting the desert to such an extent that, the author claims forebodingly, the weather now is off kilter. And Smokey the Bear doesn’t get off scot-free in the often well-intentioned but almost always simpleminded approaches to nature by a technological culture. A series of maps, drawings, and color photographs add impetus to Gehlbach’s arguments. Still, for all its assets, Mountain Islands and Desert Seas calls for a cautionary note. The author hasn’t decided whether he is writing an informal natural history or a scientific treatise. In consequence, Gehlbach’s easy style tends to careen into passages heaped with statistical stones and jargonistic boulders. Though the patches of clinical language may not buffet a biologist in the least, they will give the general reader occasional rough going. PETER WILD, Tucson, Arizona The Literary Guide to the United States. Edited by Stewart Benedict. (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1981. 246 pages, $15.95.) The explicit aim of The Literary Guide to the United States is to focus on geography in the name of literary appreciation, to explore the “American writer’s sense of place” in order to provide “a fuller understanding and enjoyment of American literature.” To this end, the country is divided into six regions, each covered by different commentators. “New York & En­ virons” is done by Stewart Benedict, the general editor, “New England” by Eugene and Patricia Flinn, “The Midwest” by Jon Spade, “The South & Border States” by Butler Brewton, “The Mountain States & Southwest” by Curtis Casewit, “California & the Far West” by Bill Logan. The resulting work by these several hands is uneven. At its best, the book achieves a skillful symmetry among critical gen­ eralizations about literary periods and significant figures, key quotations from representative works old and new, and observations on the linkage between environments and writers. Benedict’s treatment of the Harlem Renaissance is such a section, for example, as is his lively description of the Wits of the Algonquin Round Table. In the section on New England, the Flinns achieve proportion and demonstrate sensitivity to significant detail in both literature and place. They move gracefully from Boston to Penobscot, from Hawthorne and Thoreau to Updike and Stevens. The first two sec­ tions of the book thus set a standard that the subsequent sections (except­ ing Chapter IV) fail to meet. Jon Spade treats the Midwest with as much emphasis on history as on literature, and with a disproportionate emphasis on Iowa and its writers. Tennessee Williams is even characterized as a “sometime Iowan.” Hamlin Reviews 289 Garland, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters are covered ade­ quately, but contemporary writers are given short shrift. Conspicuously absent is Saul Bellow. Butler Brewton does a creditable job of examining southern writers and the evolution of southern society, including in his survey criticism, significant popular fiction, musicals, and personal narra­ tives in addition to poetry and fiction in the main stream. Such inclusive­ ness helps to establish the southern artist in his complex ambience. Here, too, though, recent writers are largely ignored. Readers with a special interest in western literature will probably be disappointed in the two sections that treat the region west of the Rocky Mountains. Curtis Casewit’s spotty coverage of his ten-state region results in part from the magnitude of the area; even so, his choices are questionable. With so many writers to cover, one wonders why Casewit chooses to devote so much space to the alien vision of Edna Ferber and disregard completely the authentic work of J. Frank Dobie, or to gossip for several pages about the Englishmen D. H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde. Satisfactory sections on Zane Grey, Vardis Fisher, and Larry McMurtry help to redeem such lapses, but lapses they remain. Bill Logan’s treatment of the three western-most states is similarly marred by disproportion and very arbitrary selectivity as well as by disorganization. Although Logan stresses location over literature, he leaves out the state of Washington altogether (and consequently a poet the stature of Roethke) while covering extensively the California detective novelists Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. As much space is given to the geologist Clarence King and the botanist John Muir...