American Epic Research Articles

Absalom, Absalom!: The Movie

TrHE view that Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner's greatest novel, his most complex and rewarding literary work, makes it easy to forget that the novel was written for the most part in Hollywood while Faulkner was paid scriptwriter. He would work on the novel early in the morning before going to the studio to write screenplays, participate in story conferences, and work on location at various film projects. The novel contains number of indelible images, including central one in which Quentin and Shreve sit a lamplit table to collaborate on the Sutpen story. The two students, together in foreign environment, sit in the room and contemplate one another's perspectives and insights across this juxtaposition of intellectual energies.1 The collaboration, the strange meeting of talents, produces compelling historical narrative. Whether their story is true enough is matter of some debate, but what is unquestionable is the amazing productivity of their joint effort. In one night they outline an American epic. Quentin and Shreve, as collaborators, must have originated not in Faulkner's experience as sole owner and proprietor of the apocryphal county but in his successful record as an employee in the Hollywood studio system. Only there did he sit regularly at lamplit tables from interlocutors in order to get story told. Absalom, Absalom! is about history and mythmaking and narrative and storytelling and all the rest, so aptly and thoroughly explicated over the past decades, but it is about one more thing as well. Absalom, Absalom! is about movie-making, and the production of images and moving pictures under the strange, forced, and often brutal conditions of an environment foreign to everyone, Hollywood.

Bardic ethos and the American epic poem: Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson

Bardic ethos and the American epic poem: Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson

"The Grapes of Wrath": Fiftieth Anniversary Edition , and: Looking For Steinbeck's Ghost , and: Working Days: The Journals of "The Grapes of Wrath" (review)

Reviewed by: "The Grapes of Wrath": Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, and: Looking For Steinbeck's Ghost, and: Working Days: The Journals of "The Grapes of Wrath" Joseph R. Millichap John Steinbeck . "The Grapes of Wrath": Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Intro. Studs Terkel. New York: Viking, 1989. 592 pp. $25.00. Jackson J. Benson . Looking For Steinbeck's Ghost. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989. 231 pp. $24.95. John Steinbeck . Working Days: The Journals of "The Grapes of Wrath." Ed. Robert DeMott. New York: Viking, 1989. 224 pp. $18.95. Nineteen eighty-nine, the fiftieth anniversary of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, was marked by many literary events in homage to both the writer and his single great work. Among them were several scholarly symposia, a number of features in the popular media, and the publication of a half-dozen books. Most appropriate among the books is a Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of The Grapes of Wrath from Viking with a new introduction by Studs Terkel; both the handsome volume and the workman-like introduction bring the reader directly back to the novel itself. Because a half century has not diminished the power of Steinbeck's classic as either social document or as American epic, it still more than repays rereading. In addition, a number of critical works also appeared in 1989. For the most part these are collections of articles, essays, and interviews already published elsewhere. More important are two new books from distinguished Steinbeck scholars Jackson J. Benson and Robert DeMott. The volumes pair nicely, both as studies of Steinbeck and of the process of making books. Benson's Looking For Steinbeck's Ghost describes the fifteen-year effort that produced his authorized and authoritative biography, The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, whereas DeMott's Working Days: The Journals of "The Grapes of Wrath" presents for the first time in print Steinbeck's complete working journals for his best known novel. In some senses, Looking for Steinbeck's Ghost proves a more accessible work than Benson's mammoth 1984 biography, as it succinctly considers Steinbeck's popular and critical reputation. The new book also explains the several defects present in Benson's definitive work. Although the biographer is even more defensive here, almost to the point of paranoia in terms of the critical and scholarly establishment that trashed Steinbeck's achievement, he is also more focused. His fifteen years of chasing Steinbeck's ghost (he began his project the year after the writer's death in 1968) was crammed into the biography to the detriment of cogent critical analysis. [End Page 753] After an autobiographical introduction explaining his involvement with Steinbeck's life, Benson structures this new book around that life, creating a neat mini-biography that moves more easily than his larger effort. He is also able to examine the critical issues of the works; for example, in Chapter Five, "Biographer As Detective," where he develops an important source for The Grapes of Wrath in the observations of Tom Collins, manager of a federal migrant camp. In fact, he comes to a clearer and better conclusion about the Steinbeck canon than he does in the biography: My own position was that he had written one masterpiece (The Grapes of Wrath), several other exceptional works that would be read for some time into the future (In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, The Long Valley, The Log from the "Sea of Cortez, " Cannery Row, and The Pearl), some books that weren't memorable (To a God Unknown, The Wayward Bus, Sweet Thursday, and The Moon Is Down, Burning Bright, and The Short Reign of Pippin IV), and a book I couldn't make up my mind about, East of Eden. Other than his waffling on East of Eden (1952), certainly one of the worst novels ever written by a serious novelist, Benson's conclusions seem eminently sensible. Looking For Steinbeck's Ghost has other interesting aspects as well. Most notably, it is also the narrative of Benson's biographical project with many interesting insights into that process. Certainly few would essay a biography after reading about the daunting circumstances of the work. Benson's greatest difficulties came from Steinbeck...

Hoover Dam: An American Adventure

In the spring of 1931, in a rugged desert canyon on the Arizona-Nevada border, an army of workmen began one of the most difficult and daring building projects ever undertaken - the construction of Hoover Dam. Through the worst years of the Great Depression as many as five thousand laborers toiled twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to erect the huge structure that would harness the Colorado River and transform the American West.Construction of the giant dam was a triumph of human ingenuity, yet the full story of this monumental endeavor has never been told. Now, in an engrossing, fast-paced narrative, Joseph E. Stevens recounts the gripping saga of Hoover Dam. Drawing on a wealth of material, including manuscript collections, government documents, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, and personal interviews and correspondence with men and women who were involved with the construction, he brings the Hoover Dam adventure to life. Described here in dramatic detail are the deadly hazards the work crews faced as they hacked and blasted the dam's foundation out of solid rock; the bitter political battles and violent labor unrest that threatened to shut the job down; the deprivation and grinding hardship endured by the workers' families; the dam builders' gambling, drinking, and whoring sprees in nearby Las Vegas; and the stirring triumphs and searing moments of terror as the massive concrete wedge rose inexorably from the canyon floor. Here, too, is an unforgettable cast of characters: Henry Kaiser, Warren Bechtel, and Harry Morrison, the ambitious, headstrong construction executives who gambled fortune and fame on the Hoover Dam contract; Frank Crowe, the brilliant, obsessed field engineer who relentlessly drove the work force to finish the dam two and a half years ahead of schedule; Sims Ely, the irascible, teetotaling eccentric who ruled Boulder City, the straightlaced company town created for the dam workers by the federal government; and many more men and women whose courage and sacrifice, greed and frailty, made the dam's construction a great human, as well as technological, adventure. Hoover Dam is a compelling, irresistible account of an extraordinary American epic.

The Devil and American Epic

The Devil and American Epic

Review Essay: Recent Chicano Writing

Review Essay: Recent Chicano Writing Raymund A. Paredes University of California Los Angeles Chicano (or Mexican American — I use the terms interchangeably) writing has grown remarkably since 1965 when Luis Valdez yoked his considerable playwrighting talents to the cause of César Chavez's farmworkers' union and launched a literary movement . The publication of a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is no longer a rare event; indeed, two publishing houses, Arte Público Press of Houston and the Bilingual Press of Tempe, Arizona, seem to be flourishing by specializing in just such works. Some Chicano writers, Gary Soto for example, have acquired national reputations while others, most notably Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, have won prestigious literary awards in Latin America. This surge in creative activity has been accompanied by a rise in literary criticism. In the past year, two ambitious studies have appeared: Marta Sanchez's Contemporary Chicana Poetry (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) and Cordelia Candelaria's Chicano Poetry (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1986). One of the most gratifying developments in Chicano writing recently has been the expansion of its ideological perspectives. Always innovative in its structural and linguistic features, Chicano writing, especially in the first decade of its emergence, often verged close to predictability in its presentation of the social, cultural, and economic circumstances of Chicano life. This quality was not surprising, given that Chicano writing initially evolved in a highly charged political context and that authors felt obligated to promote a program of social reform and cultural preservation. That Chicano writers as a group no longer felt bound to a particular political and ideological agenda became clear in 1981 when Richard Rodriguez assailed bilingual education and affirmative action programs in his autobiographical Hunger ofMemory, much to the astonishment of numerous Anglo reviewers who lavished praise on the book in journals ranging from the New York Times Book Review to People magazine. The continued diversity of current Chicano writing, ideological and otherwise, is evident in works that have recently appeared. Of all the works under review here, Lionel Garcia's Leaving Home is the most predictable and the least satisfying. The novel traces the experiences of several Mexican Americans who live in California just before and during World War II. Like José Antonio Villarreal and Rudolfo Anaya before him, Garcia focuses on this period as a watershed for Mexican Americans, a time when their patriotic feelings turned irrevocably away from Mexico and they found themselves involved in the central events of American Ufe. Leaving Home is that most typical of American ethnic works: the generational novel of conflict, acculturation, and, inevitably so it seems, assimilation . Garcia is an ambitious writer; he has in mind nothing less than a Mexican American epic, a chronicle of ethnogenesis (to use Werner Sollors' term) that delineates the development of Mexican American culture and character. Unfortunately, Garcia's achievement falls short of his ambition. First, the novel is ineptly written, occasionally to the point of unintended humor. No editor seems to have glanced at the manuscript. Garcia writes that sweaters are "hanged" on 124 Book Reviews125 clotheslines and that a character "had drank too much." A female character has skin that "was smooth, though wrinkled and very pale" while a male character, we are told, is "mostly in a bad mood all the time." In addition to his grammatical and logical errors, Garcia develops his plot clumsily. Characters come and go and reappear improbably. And both major characters are flat and hardly more than conveyances for Garcia's careless observations about Mexican American experience. Garcia seems to have learned much of what he believes about Mexican Americans from John Steinbeck. Many of Garcia's characters resemble thepaisanos of Tortilla Flat, stupendously ignorant and complacent, unconcerned about pulUng themselves out of their cultural muck. Garcia connects their behavior to the long history of bigotry against Mexican Americans in California but much too weakly to mitigate the novel's portrayal of Mexican American culture as inherently and severely pathological. The uninformed reader might conclude from Garcia's work that Chícanos deserve every act of malfeasance directed at them by Anglo society and that assimilation is the only remedy for the scourge...

The Spanish War: An American Epic, 1898

The Spanish War: An American Epic, 1898

The Spanish War: An American Epic, 1898.

The Spanish War: An American Epic, 1898.

An American Epic

An American Epic

The Guggenheims: An American Epic

The Guggenheims: An American Epic

John G. Neihardt and the American Epic

John G. Neihardt and the American Epic

The Land and the City in American Religious Conflict

American religious history can be divided rather neatly into two periods. The first, beginning with Native American religion down to and through the Revolution, involved the competing religious parties in territorial conflict over land. The Great Awakening, the Revolution, and the growth of competition among denominations meant a turn from concern for "landscape" to one of "cityscape," without diminishing the struggles over space. This paper examines this conflict from the viewpoint of a number of sociological theories of conflict, settling on models from Georg Simmel as being more satisfying than others in helping account for American religious tensions. "Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who, you are."' "Tierra! Tierra! Land! Land! ... you have found land!" The reported cry of Rodrigo de Triana aboard the Pinta at 2:00 A.M. on October 12, 1492, and Christopher Co6 lumbus's words when sight of land was verified begin the American epic. They set the theme for much of what follows, just as the words "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" prelcast Genesis or "Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood" anticipates the rest of Dante's great work. For almost five hundred years the land itself has served as the unifying theme of the American epic, not least of all in its religious dimensions. If a person stammers when asked what is American about American religion, he or she can attempt a first word by pointing to the obvious and banal: the adjective "American" points to a place, a land, a landscape, an environment that shapes and then is shaped by the people

Truck by John Jeromne

Reviews 239 (1894) , his use of Active doubles, and his empathy with certain Western types, Gish then discusses in some detail the better Far-Western fiction, novels like The Eagle’s Heart (1900), The Captain of the Grey-Horse Troop (1902), Hesper (1903), .Money Magic (1907), and the belated story collec­ tion, The Book of the American Indian (1923). Gish rightly contends that the Far-Western writings are integral to our understanding of Garland and to our appreciation of the relationship between Western regionalism and American realism, and Gish’s cautious qualification — “regardless of one’s judgment of their intrinsic worth” — shows that he well understands their severe aesthetic limitations. To show the underlying continuity of Garland’s career, Gish relates Garland’s metaphors of journeying and climb­ ing (and even his travel essays) to the Far-Western fiction, a type of “iden­ tity or vision quest” which, after twenty-two years, would lead Garland back to his youth and into the “purer autobiography” of his final phase. Author of a forthcoming book on John G. Neihardt (1881-1973), Lucile F. Aly has written a splendid pamphlet, a timely addition to the Neihardt revival churned up by American Indianmania and Neihardt’s wizardry on the Dick Cavett Show a few years back. As a former instructor at the University of Missouri (when Neihardt taught his popular courses in epic and poetics), I can vouch for the nicety of Aly’s portrait of the little lion from Nebraska who seemed to us to live in a dimension of time and poetry out of step with the tighter world of university poets like Donald Drummond and Thomas McAfee. In a style firm and clear Aly weaves biography, criticism, and methodology to tell the story of Neihardt’s “glorious” life and twenty-eight-year-long creation of his massive Cycle of the West (1949). Receptive to “Otherness,” Neihardt lovingly penned his American epic of Westward expansion in “rhymed blank verse,” in “musical utterance intended to communicate to all readers deep truths of the human heart.” Charges of sentimentality, archaism, inversion, grandiosity, and indecorum — these Aly plausibly absorbs into her resonant assessment of Neihardt’s Homeric achievement. MARTIN BUCCO, Colorado State I!niversity Truck. By John Jerome. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. 145 pages, $6.95.) John Jerome has written a story of his two loves — his New Hampshire farm and his truck. The two involvements bring him insight into the conflict between the natural and mechanized worlds, the qualities of country living, and what a truck really is. John Jerome, an ex-New York careerist, bought a farm in New Hamp­ 240 Western American Literature shire, lured by its enchanting beauty and his own dream of living off the land. During his first summer he energetically rebuilt the old farm house and put in an organic garden. When he needed assistance with the heavy work, he bought a 1950 pick-up truck and here the story begins. Buying a pickup is a simple task for most people but for Jerome it is the beginning of a love affair. In chapter one he is revealed as a “greaser,” not as the Thoreau he thought he was, for he quickly becomes immersed in the thought of completely disassembling and then meticulously rebuilding the old pickup into a gleaming piece of machinery. His second love, which he “circles nervously,” is the countryside. The rebuilding of the truck is the matrix of the book and is absolutely intriguing, for it resembles a creatively written Dodge workshop manual, and is also a suspenseful techno-adventure. Throughout the book I was reminded of Hunt’s “The Ascent of Everest.” Exchange Sears tools for ice axes and a successfully assembled truck for the summit of Everest and there is little difference. Both achieve­ ments were painful and exacting and in both idealism transforms into wisdom. Truck is also rich in obscure information such as where to get a timing chain cover for a 1950 pickup. The force of the book is that it explores just what technology is, thereby giving us insight into our fabricated age. Jerome sees technology as a creative problem-solving process with minds ticking. For instance, he...

Alexander Wilson's forest adventure: the sublime and the satirical in Wilson's poem, 'The Foresters'

Alexander Wilson's poem (1809—1810) is a topographical poem. Such a poem is rambling in structure and therefore admits a variety of styles and purposes. These poems look back, in part, to the tradition of Virgil's Georgics, which ranges from farming and veterinary medicine to mythology and the influence of the gods. Although the Foresters lacks the aesthetic unity of the Georgics and the Latin poet's spiritualism, it nevertheless implies its own theism in a distant and transcendent assertion of the virgin purity of the forests of Pennsylvania and New York. The land is thus celebrated, but man defiles the purity of the forests, bringing squalor and lust to the pristine banks of the American rivers. Thus sublime motifs and satirical thrusts are placed in contrast, enabling the poet to show the dichotomy between the ideal and the actual. He ridicules the naive assumption that a peopled territory might restore lost Eden. To some, Washington Irving included, the forests induced a sense of claustrophobia felt by travelers deep in the backwoods where commonplace America and wilderness America both yielded up a feeling of meaningless existence, of being cut off from the signposts of civilization.1 To others, new lands offered unique wildlife, virgin flora, and original experiences to enrich poetic catalogues and invigorate that poet who someday would produce an American epic poem. Because Wilson treats obvious paradoxes that the naturalist-satirist Alexander Wilson might have sought to reconcile, it seems worthwile

Thomas Merton and the American Epic Tradition: The Last Poems

In his last two books, completed shortly before his journey to Asia and death in Bangkok in 1968, Thomas Merton turned from the more conventional free verse style of his earlier poems to an irreverent antipoetic mixture of sense and apparent nonsense, of sincere protest and ironic satire, to convey his sense of the confusion, the violence, and the accelerating breakdown of modem civilization. In these testamentary works, Cables to the Ace (1968) and Geography of Lograire (1969),' Merton also assumes the role of epic or culture poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Willams. change is proclaimed in the prologue to Cables to the Ace as Merton flippantly greets his readers: The poet has not announced these mosaics on purpose. Furthermore he has changed his address and his poetics are on vacation. He is not roaring in the old tunnel (CA, p. 1). Despite an impatient dismissal of the public as a rabble, there is a Whitmanesque acknowledgment of the representativeness of the poet in the closing lines:

Melville's Doubloon and the Shield of Achilles

IF ASKED TO NAME ONE WORK of fiction as the American epic, most students of literature would no doubt choose Moby-Dick. By general consent this work not only has most of the internal qualifications of epic (however they may be defined), but it has also attained a standing in our national self-conception roughly comparable to that of Paradise Lost in England or Homer's poems in Greece. Milton, who was deeply immersed in academic classical learning from an early age, has been widely studied for Greek and Roman influences. Melville has not, perhaps because his schooling was informal and haphazard, and because in his writing there is little of that learned allusiveness with which Milton advertised his classical models. These conditions have led to a widespread assumption that the influence of classical epic on Moby-Dick, however profound, must have been general, broadly conceptual, and more or less diffuse. In this article I hope to encourage a more precise and specific classical reading of Moby-Dick by pointing out some striking similarities between the gold doubloon which is nailed to the Pequod's mast and the shield made by Hephaestus for Achilles in the eighteenth Book of Homer's Iliad. The Homeric parallels to Melville's doubloon invite the surmise that it was actually suggested by Homer's Shield of Achilles. As I will show, there is some good circumstantial evidence in favor of such an interpretation. The object of my argument is not, however,

The Black American Epic: Its Roots, its Writers

Eugene B. Redmond is a professor of Black Studies at Sacramento State College, Calif. Widely known as a poet and editor, Redmond has taught at Oberlin College and Southern Illinois (East St. Louis). His poems have appeared in Tambourine, New Black Poetry, Negro Voices: An Anthology of Negro Poetry and other anthologies. He is editor of two collections of the late Henry Dumas' works, Poems for My People and Ark of Bones and Other Stories. Redmond's most recent volume ( 1970 ) of poetry is Sentry of Four Golden Pillars, House of Truth, East St. Louis. African made slave in America. There has, however, always been more than conjecture to go on (though today too many imread youth feel free to guess at relationships between the then and or, as the poet might put it, the now and now), for many scholars have observed, studied and placed their findings at the disposal of the general public. Personal background, then, combined with studies, allows us to state that folklore ( especially animal stories and fables), song styles, tonal utterances and many general practices and customs tie the black American to his African starting point. A prerequisite to embarking on a discussion of the origin, growth and development of an indigenous Black American Epic is an understanding of the ingredients characterizing epics in all times: elevated communal folk expression; general, and on occasion, specific detailing of a people's lifestyle carved by the pen of one viewing his subject through the collective eye and mind; a heroic best-foot-forward picture of a race, personified and embodied in the protagonist, e.g., John Henry! Tracing the genealogical table of the Black American Epic sends us back. Margaret Walker, in Sorrow Home, finds the other end of the natal cord:

An American Epic: The Guns Cease Killing and the Saving of Life from Famine Begins, 1939-1963. Herbert Hoover

<i>An American Epic: The Guns Cease Killing and the Saving of Life from Famine Begins, 1939-1963</i>. Herbert Hoover

An American Epic. Volume IV, The Guns Cease Killing and the Saving of Life from Famine Begins, 1939–1963. By &lt;italic&gt;Herbert Hoover&lt;/italic&gt;. [The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace.] (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. 1964. Pp. xv, 322. $7.50.)

An American Epic. Volume IV, The Guns Cease Killing and the Saving of Life from Famine Begins, 1939–1963. By Herbert Hoover. [The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace.] (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. 1964. Pp. xv, 322. $7.50.) Get access An American Epic. Volume IV, The Guns Cease Killing and the Saving of Life from Famine Begins, 1939–1963. By Hoover Herbert. [The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace.] (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. 1964. Pp. xv, 322. $7.50.) George McGovern George McGovern Washington, D. C. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 70, Issue 2, January 1965, Pages 489–490, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/70.2.489 Published: 01 January 1965

An American Epic. Volume IV, The Guns cease Killing and the Saving of Life from Famine Begins, 1939-1963

An American Epic. Volume IV, The Guns cease Killing and the Saving of Life from Famine Begins, 1939-1963