“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
August 9, 2016 11:29 AM   Subscribe

Of Thee I Read: The United States in Literature [The New York Times] Reporters and editors on the National Desk of The New York Times were asked to suggest books that a visitor ought to read to truly understand the American cities and regions where they live, work and travel. There were no restrictions — novels, memoirs, histories and children’s books were fair game. Here are some selections. Recommend a book that captures something special about where you live in the comments, or on Twitter with the hashtag #natbooks.
• Boston - “Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families” by J. Anthony Lukas
• Maine - “One Morning in Maine” by Robert McCloskey
• The South - “The Militant South” by John Hope Franklin
• New Orleans - “The Accidental City” by Lawrence N. Powell
• The Midwest - “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen” by Bob Greene
• The Southwest - “Blood and Thunder” by Hampton Sides
• The Pacific Northwest - “Selling Seattle: Representing Contemporary Urban America” by James Lyons
• California - “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water” by Marc Reisner
• Los Angeles - “Songs in the Key of Los Angeles” by Josh Kun
• Florida - “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise” by Michael Grunwald
• Atlanta - “A Man in Full” by Tom Wolfe
• Missouri - “Woe to Live On: A Novel” by Daniel Woodrell
posted by Fizz (53 comments total) 52 users marked this as a favorite
 
I live in Niagara Falls, Ontario and if you're wanting a good book about this region, I highly suggest reading Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand.
posted by Fizz at 11:32 AM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


• The Midwest - “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen” by Bob Greene

I would go with "Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson, but I'd pretty much go with that for the entire USA, so YMMV.
posted by Etrigan at 11:45 AM on August 9, 2016 [5 favorites]


"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole should really be the go-to for New Orleans, but obv, YMMV. One book I love about being young and queer in NOLA is "Hey Joe" by Ben Neihart (one day I'll find another human being that has read it); it's a coming out story where nothing horrible happens to the young protagonist and all these years later, that still blows my mind.
posted by Kitteh at 11:46 AM on August 9, 2016 [6 favorites]


There is no shortage of great books on Louisiana, though a lot of them, like A. J. Liebling’s brilliant “The Earl of Louisiana,” better serve as reminders of the eccentric ways the place used to work than as guides to understanding it now. (From Campbell Robertson's New Orleans pick.)

True of a lot of books about places, so while there are plenty of books I could recommend about a place, it's harder to pick books that help you to "truly understand" a place as it currently exists. Gonna have to think about that one.

Also, I really want to read that book on North Platte, Nebraska. If you're ever traveling on I-80, try to make time to stop at the Golden Spike Museum there. It's super-awesome being able to watch the largest rail classification yard in the world (even if you're not really a railfan and don't know much about trains.) When I was there, there was a retired rail worker on hand who had plenty of stories to tell about how the area had changed over the years, and plenty of details to point out on the tracks.
posted by asperity at 11:47 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also, for me, "Rich in Love" by Josephine Humphreys evokes a Charleston that was still in existence when I was in my late teens. (The movie, with Albert Finney and Kyle Maclachlan, isn't bad either.)
posted by Kitteh at 11:52 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Robert McCloskey did very fine work, but his Maine is the one dreamed about by summer people from Connecticut and New York (or Boston, where he went to art school). Bill Roorbach (who also does great work) suggests that Carolyn Chute best represents another aspect of the Pine Tree State.
posted by LeLiLo at 11:55 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


"The Living" by Annie Dillard for the PNW
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 12:00 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


But how will I ever find a book to help me understand New York City?
posted by the_blizz at 12:11 PM on August 9, 2016 [16 favorites]


This is cool; thanks.

For me, having grown up near LA, it is the noir of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and the essays of Joan Didion that so completely capture the nature of California, and the things that I both love and hate about it — that sense of darkness and misery and greedy grasping hard up against the unquestionable beauty and mildness and lushness of the coast. (Inland is a different and harsher beast.)

Cadillac Desert and Mike Davis's books (City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear) are both good and true, but it is notable that it is an East Coast transplant that recommends them. People from outside California love to harp on its impossibility, its grotesqueness in terms of resources in a way that, to me, misses the real darkness that I struggle with. (Mike Davis from Fontana of course, so it isn't that Californians don't see or talk about it, but, it just seems too ... obvious? Uncomplicated?)

But I like this list. What would people say for New York, I wonder. I love my adult hometown in a way that is much less complicated than California, but I cannot think of a work that just screams Brooklyn to me.
posted by dame at 12:12 PM on August 9, 2016 [3 favorites]


Or I guess we could be snotty about New York instead. I think this question is so interesting though! Like all these feelings about all these places and looking for the story that best captures it so you can point other people there. I am getting sentimental in my old age, but I like it.
posted by dame at 12:15 PM on August 9, 2016


Related from AskMe, but broader: Take me on a tour of words, to places you remember
posted by filthy light thief at 12:34 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


Did people actually like A Man in Full? I've never read it, but I didn't think it was especially well received, and wouldn't have been an obvious choice for Atlanta for me.
posted by penduluum at 12:43 PM on August 9, 2016


But how will I ever find a book to help me understand New York City?
The Power Broker.
posted by TrialByMedia at 12:46 PM on August 9, 2016 [8 favorites]


I don't think the list is complete without:

Southern California - "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" by D.J. Waldie.

Also, and I recommend this as an Iowan, sad but true: Midwest - "Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town" by Nick Reding

because really North Platte is hardly the Midwest I mean they themselves really think they are in the West and they aren't exactly West but really hardly the Midwest I mean there's a big cowboy statue thing in the middle of the town
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:51 PM on August 9, 2016 [6 favorites]


Did people actually like A Man in Full? I've never read it, but I didn't think it was especially well received, and wouldn't have been an obvious choice for Atlanta for me.

I read it and liked it despite a personal animus for Tom Wolfe. And it resonated with the picture of Atlanta I'd established as a North Florida resident who made periodic trips to the city in the late 70s and early 80s.
posted by layceepee at 12:57 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


But how will I ever find a book to help me understand New York City?

Low Life, by Luc Sante
posted by panama joe at 1:00 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]




Did people actually like A Man in Full? I've never read it, but I didn't think it was especially well received, and wouldn't have been an obvious choice for Atlanta for me.

I'm just disappointed it didn't bring about a resurgence in contemporary Stoicism.

...uh, I mean I'm not disappointed, because I accept that events have unfolded as they have, and find contentment in that.

but still.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:43 PM on August 9, 2016 [9 favorites]


"Quick, we need a picture from Boston to go with your piece about tribalism in the city and the soul staining history of segregation in its schools!"
"Uh, well, my cousin Scott works at the Pizzeria Unos in Kenmore Square..."
"Great! Get him outside and have him take a picture of whatever he sees there!"
"Even if it's just some dude with a jug?"
"ESPECIALLY if it's just some dude with a jug. This is BOSTON we're talking about!"
posted by robocop is bleeding at 1:44 PM on August 9, 2016 [3 favorites]


Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. To see what it is/was like to be a young black person in the
South and then in NY. Here the focus is upon race rather than geography. But in
America, dear visitor, race is an issue everywhere.
posted by Postroad at 1:52 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]




Salt Lake City: Terry Tempest William's Refuge. (She has a new book out about the National Parks, I cannot wait to dive into it.)

Oregon: Sally Tisdale's Stepping Westward. Great essay collection.

California: Marc Reisner's follow-up, A Dangerous Place, a compare-contrast of the Bay Area and LA, and the likely consequences of the next Big One.
posted by suelac at 2:13 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


"Staggerford" and Jon Hassler's other books are good at evoking a certain kind of small-town Midwestern academia (specifically Minnesota).
posted by wenestvedt at 2:16 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


For North Dakota: The Horizontal World by Debra Marquart
posted by SyraCarol at 2:46 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Goodnight Pensacola by Anna Theriault
posted by syncope at 2:49 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Blue Sky Dream by David Beers and Sunnyvale by Jeff Goodell for a look at pre dot com Silicon Valley/Santa Clara.
posted by vespabelle at 2:49 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Of course: Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Yearling, all of Carl Hiaasen's books and so on. Florida isn't a monolith. Also it's not all full of transplants and transients (not in the homeless sense) who will leave in a year. My first rec was a kids' book from my town. These are grown up ones you have to consider while you read. Even Hiaasen can bring it even though people associate with comedy.
posted by syncope at 3:05 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


"Hey Joe" by Ben Neihart (one day I'll find another human being that has read it)

Not only have I read it, I was in an MFA program with Ben while he was writing it!
posted by escabeche at 3:15 PM on August 9, 2016 [4 favorites]


Madison, Wisconsin: "Rads," which is on the one hand an account of the 1970 bombing of Stirling Hall at UW-Madison by student radicals, but in a broader sense is the best portrait I know of a city that's a midwestern college town and an international center of scholarship and a party village for rich kids from New York and a symbol of political excess to the rest of the state and the conceptual heart of the state & & & ....
posted by escabeche at 3:19 PM on August 9, 2016


Dont' live there, but you'll learn a lot about the landscapes and cultures of rural New Mexico and Arizona reading Tony Hillerman's detective novels along with a good map.

They are indispensible characters in all of his captivating yarns.
posted by Twang at 3:30 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Don't think much of their Maine selection - as it turns out, there are people who actually live in Maine year-round, and have a different perspective on the state than those who only vacation there (even summer people who spend the whole season). A better recent (leaving out Sarah Orne Jewett or similar earlier authors) collection might include "Kitchen Boy" by Sanford Phippen or "Stern Men" by Elizabeth Gilbert for coastal stories, "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" by Carolyn Chute for inland Maine, and something by Cathie Pelletier or another Franco-American author.
posted by eviemath at 3:42 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


The quintessential history of my ancestral homeland of eastern Kentucky: Harry Caudill's Night Comes To the Cumberlands.
posted by HillbillyInBC at 4:03 PM on August 9, 2016


The first thing I noticed about the above list is that all the authors are men. (All white men, perhaps? I don't have time right now to Google everyone whose name I don't recognize.)
posted by trillian at 4:05 PM on August 9, 2016 [3 favorites]


(Everything I know about Maine I learned from Stephen King. Maybe I need to revisit that.)
posted by maxwelton at 4:28 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


Ironweed for Albany. Nobody's Fool for small town Upstate.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:56 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


I liked "A Man in Full" very much, despite obvious caveats about Tom Wolfe.

For New Orleans, I would recommend "The Mysteries of New Orleans", an "Urban Gothic" novel from 1854. It gives you a sense of what an immigrant melting pot New Orleans was, plus it's pretty gruesome and cool.

However, I am not from Atlanta or New Orleans, so I can't legitimately speak about them. I'm from Michigan, and I have never read anything so deep and true about the Upper Peninsula than "Brown Dog" by Jim Harrison.
posted by acrasis at 5:08 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


acrasis, is Brown Dog a good starting place for Jim Harrison? I've heard great things about him. Also, I've heard the name Charles Bukowski mentioned in association with him, which isn't something I'm really a big fan of. Bukowski's treatment of women in his literature is troubling to me.
posted by Fizz at 5:57 PM on August 9, 2016


The first thing I noticed about the above list is that all the authors are men.

A woman? Writing about cities and regions? Surely you just, sir!
posted by happyroach at 6:37 PM on August 9, 2016


Seriously, I thought the Kinsey Millhone mysteries by Sue Grafton have a good, somewhat irreverent feeling for the Santa Barbara area. Of course it's not Important Literature (i.e. male), but still I could recognize my home town.
posted by happyroach at 6:43 PM on August 9, 2016


For Arkansas: Let Us Build Us a City by Donald Harrington. A book about 11 mostly dead towns in Arkansas, each of which contain "city" in their names. About the optimism and pride of their founders (who assumed they were starting great metropolises), and how the world eventually ground them down, or how these places never had much hope to begin with. And there's a meta-narrative about the loneliness of the author, nostalgic for his native Arkansas and far from home, when a woman's fan letter (first fan letter in ages; sent in regards to his out-of-print novel) sends him back to the state and gives him the idea of searching abandoned places for some memory of home.

This is an absolutely beautiful and quiet book. Gives a sense of an Arkansas which is kinda gone forever, and kinda is still there lurking on the backroads.
posted by honestcoyote at 7:05 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


Did people actually like A Man in Full? I've never read it, but I didn't think it was especially well received, and wouldn't have been an obvious choice for Atlanta for me.

I liked it, but years later I don't feel that it has imbued my life with a sense of Atlanta.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:31 PM on August 9, 2016


Boss by Mike Royko is one of the essential Chicago books. So is Crossing California by Adam Langer.
posted by SisterHavana at 12:02 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've never heard of Selling Seattle but based on the publishers' blurbs it is, in fact, about selling Seattle to the rest of the country and only the last decade or so.

Even if the most salient thing about this region just now is how the rest of the country consumes it, which alas might be true, I'd rather recommend any of the excellent books on why it is like it is. Too High and Too Steep has physical and engineering history as well as marketing; Skid Road is the classic (also about export, hm) with Sons of the Profits a close second (okay, theme).

But G. M. Ford's Leo Waterman mysteries are also running high. Mysteries are a great regional narrative, since they have to get across both the facade everyone believes and the levers working behind the scenes.
posted by clew at 12:41 AM on August 10, 2016


"The Liars Club" by Mary Karr puts you in East Texas. She lived it of course but then she accurately transcribed it, an amazing gift. I have worked with the people she wrote about, I have eaten in their homes, I have heard their linguistic tics, I have dated their women, though not enough of them. Yet. Karr got it down exactly. She nailed it. And it's funnier than hell, to boot. Read this book.

Blood and Money by Thomas Thompson. Texas in general, across time, Houston in particular, 1950s and 1960s. Oil. Medicine. Horses. Society. Adultery. Murder. Power. Law. Tragedy. The obsessive love of a father for his daughter, the obsessive hatred of a father for his daughters murderer. It is the best true crime that I have ever read. It is one of the best books I have ever read, period. Anyone who wants to get a bearing on or in Houston should read this book, and so should anyone else.

These two books will put you in Texas.
posted by dancestoblue at 2:26 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Can a Texan comment on "The Last Picture Show" and Larry McMurtry's other, subsequent books set in that town?
posted by wenestvedt at 5:49 AM on August 10, 2016


For Connecticut? The Secret History. It isn't even set there, but that's not relevant. All completely accurate, except for the bacchanalia thing, and, uh.... *side eyes Greenwich*
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 6:06 AM on August 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


honest coyote - anything by Donald Harington, well, except for The Cherry Pit, gives people a wonderful sense of the Ozarks - which is more than Arkansas, but is certainly focused on the Arkansas area in his books. I go back and forth in terms of which of his books is my favorite, and Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks is good, but I am still partial to Lightning Bug as the book where he truly found his voice. Let Us Build Us a City is wonderful as a non-fiction book, but also has a nice meta-textual element that ends on such a nice romantic note - wonderful for a book that's been about both celebrating and puncturing the romantic notions of the settlers of those towns.

Lutoslawski - Nebraska, including North Platte, is part of the Great Plains, which got lumped in with the Midwest, but is not really part of it culturally. The Midwest also includes a strong industrial element once you get into the last half of the 19th century, and that part is not really there in the Great Plains. The North Platte Canteen book is a good choice, but I could also go with the cliched Willa Cather or the less known and thus less cliched Mari Sandoz. They are the standards of the Pioneer spirit, which is still very dominant in this part of the country.

Wenestvedt Jon Hassler is a great choice for human stories. period. But yes, especially in his earlier works, you get a very definite sense of Minnesota. The years I taught Staggerford, my students would begin by rolling their eyes, but it quickly became one of their favorite books by the end.
posted by jkosmicki at 6:16 AM on August 10, 2016


Driftless, by David Rhodes for SW Wisconsin.
Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold for rural Wisconsin.
Sweetland, by Michael Crummey for Newfoundland.
Studs Lonigan Trilogy, by James T. Farrell for Chicago.
The Man with the Golden Arm or the Neon Wilderness, by Nelson Algren for Chicago.
My Antonia, by Willa Cather for Nebraska.
Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver, for Appalachia.
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake for West Virginia/Appalachia
Working, by Studs Terkel for Chicago.
Native Son, by Richard Wright, for Chicago.
By the Ore Docks: A Working People's History of Duluth, by Richard Hudelson (for Duluth, MN)
Backbone or Letters from the Country, by Carol Bly for Minnesota
The Homewood Trilogy, by John Edgar Wideman for Pittsburgh.
The Bingo Palace or Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich, for North Dakota.
Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin for SF
Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey for Oregon.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie for Spokane.
posted by RedEmma at 7:36 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


for those who wonder about the quote used for the post title, Quote Investigator has a good rundown of its non-humorous origins.
posted by numaner at 8:38 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


For me, having grown up near LA, it is the noir of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and the essays of Joan Didion that so completely capture the nature of California, and the things that I both love and hate about it — that sense of darkness and misery and greedy grasping hard up against the unquestionable beauty and mildness and lushness of the coast. (Inland is a different and harsher beast.)

The Chandler/MacDonald view is very much just southern California culture, though. The thing I love about Joan Didion is that she represents inland California - before she decamped to New York, a lot of her writing was about growing up in the insular Central Valley, so much so that the quote (from "Notes from a Native Daughter") that sticks with me most is:
“That Johnston boy never did amount to much,” she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize, when he was working for The New York Times. Our hostess looked at us impassively. “He never amounted to anything in Sacramento,” she said.
Does it represent California as a whole better than, say, Armistead Maupin or Ronald Takaki or Amy Tan or William Saroyan or Richard Rodriguez? I don't know, but I do have a special place in my heart for Cadillac Desert because it does take our (uniquely, in the U.S.) Mediterranean climate and the human attempt to push its carrying capacity to the limits as a foundational aspect of why California is different.
posted by psoas at 10:03 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'll Trade You An Elk by Charles A. Goodrum, for Wichita, KS. Or at least I'd like to hope so, I've read it so many times.
posted by lagomorphius at 2:11 PM on August 10, 2016


"Did people actually like A Man in Full? I've never read it, but I didn't think it was especially well received, and wouldn't have been an obvious choice for Atlanta for me."

I don't remember liking or disliking it, but I thought Wolfe's descriptions of places I knew, like Chamblee-Tucker, were spot-on, and made me think he'd done his research.
posted by lagomorphius at 2:17 PM on August 10, 2016


Fizz, yes. "Brown Dog" is a collection of novellas about Brown Dog, a guy who is ordinary and aimless and hilariously prone to doing stupid things. The joy of these stories is that we grow to love Brown Dog and realize that if we can't love him, we can't love humanity. He is dumb abut women, but Harrison isn't.
posted by acrasis at 4:09 PM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


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