These United States Original Essays By Leading American Writers On Their State Within The Union

Eighty-two years ago, The Nation launched a series of forty-nine articles by a distinguished, skeptical, and contentious group of writers, each of whom had been asked to contemplate his or her state in the union. Their essays were collected and published as These United States: Portrait of America from the 1920s, less a symposium than a remarkably evocative crazy-quilt of styles and apprehensions, moods and meditations, art and anthropology, reportage and polemic. In 2001 a similar group of maverick minds were invited to pick up in the new century where the likes of Edmund Wilson (New Jersey), H. L. Mencken (Maryland), W. E. B. DuBois (Georgia), Willa Cather (Nebraska), Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), and Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota) left off back in the jazz age. Ours is less of a jazz than a buzz age, so full of yak cable, white noise, disinformation, and hypnotherapy that sorting out the signals to arrive at scruple, gravity, or grace gets harder every day. Still, seeing and sorting is what these writers were asked to do, as well as tell us something we didn't know. What we received from Sherman Alexie (Washington), Annie Proulx (Wyoming), James Lee Burke (Louisiana), Tony Hillerman (New Mexico), Molly Ivins (Texas), Diane McWhorter (Alabama), Frank Conroy (Iowa), Charles Bowden (Arizona) was an eclectic selection of essays ranging from songs to sermons, polemics to personal history, cityscapes, landscapes, and dreamscapes, which taken together form a unique, powerful, and inspiring portrait of contemporary America. Book jacket.Leonard, John is the author of 'These United States Original Essays By Leading American Writers On Their State Within The Union', published 2004 under ISBN 9781560256182 and ISBN 1560256184.