Selected Reading
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Lew Wallace – Porter County, Indiana
Lew Wallace Grand Kankakee MarshPorter County, Indiana By Matthew A. Werner Indiana once had one of the greatest natural habitats in North America: the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Author Lew Wallace loved it so much, he kept a houseboat on its thruway, the Kankakee River....
James Tate – Pittsburg, Kansas
James Tate Cow Creek CrossingPittsburg, Kansas By Leslie VonHolten Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The...
Mark Twain – Hannibal, Missouri
Mark Twain Cave—underneath Hannibal, MO, where in the middle of a tour, the lights went out, and “this shared, quiet darkness felt elemental and deeply human.”
Heid E. Erdrich – Minneapolis, Minnesota
Heid Erdrich & All My Relations art gallery—“imaginative language-meaning” in the American Indian Cultural Corridor.
Meridel Le Sueur – Picher, Oklahoma
Meridel Le Sueur & a miner’s shack—how investigating environmental damage reveals “the hopeful and radical potential of regionalism and place.”
Jean Shepherd – Hammond, Indiana
Jean Shepherd’s childhood home—written as both a “mythical place” and an avatar of Hammond, IN, “just a few miles upwind” of steel mills, oil refineries, and polluted rivers.
Mari Sandoz – Sheridan County, Nebraska
“Even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.” — C.J. Janovy
Mary Hunter Austin – Carlinville, Illinois
Mary Hunter Austin & Blackburn College—a kinship in the desire to walk about unhampered and forge meaningful connections. #LiteraryLandscapes by Karen Dillon & Naomi Crummey.
Booth Tarkington – Indianapolis, Indiana
Booth Tarkington & North Meridian St.—striving for beauty and dignity amid the turmoil of this past year. #LiteraryLandscapes
Gwendolyn Brooks – Chicago, Illinois
Gwendolyn Brooks & South Side Community Art Center—looking back toward Bronzeville: Brooks’s voice above the hum. #LiteraryLandscapes
Aldo Leopold – Baraboo, Wisconsin
Aldo Leopold’s Writing Shack—the “land ethic” of a converted chicken coop, feeding the soul in Sand County. #LiteraryLandscapes by Marc Seals.
James Emanuel – Alliance, Nebraska
Two generations finding “my truth and my refuge” at the Alliance Public Library. #LiteraryLandscapes by Sean Stewart.
Norbert Blei – Sister Bay, Wisconsin
Norbert Blei & Al Johnson’s—fikasugen, “Counter Culture,” and the longing for public spaces.
Maya Angelou – Stamps, Arkansas
Maya Angelou & the memorial at Lake June—“picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across, imagining the breeze she once breathed.”
Sandra Cisneros – Chicago, Illinois
Humboldt Park—where the condo that replaced the house on Mango Street “has an attenuated look, seeming to both belong and not belong.”
S.E. Hinton – Tulsa, Oklahoma
S.E. Hinton & Crutchfield—Tulsa’s part in “a story about boundary lines, divisions that we create and perpetuate.”
Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt – North Bend, Ohio
Though Piatt’s writing seems “sweet and peaceful,” it “proves to be like ‘the depths of a dark river,’ ‘shadowy and terrible.’”
Willa Cather – Taos, New Mexico
Willa Cather & the mesa outside Taos, New Mexico—where “the desert is everything and nothing. God without men.”
Willa Cather – Red Cloud, Nebraska
Willa Cather & the Pavelka Farmstead—where, writes Christine Pivovar, “I could imagine myself as one of Ántonia’s daughters, kneading the dough for kolaches.”
Willa Cather – Omaha, Nebraska
Willa Cather & Glacier Creek Preserve—where the grass “reflects the fire of a Great Plains sunset.”
Willa Cather – Jaffrey, New Hampshire
Willa Cather & the Old Burying Ground of Jaffrey, New Hampshire—where she was, finally, “dissolved into something complete and great.”
Willa Cather – Chicago, Illinois
Willa Cather & the Fine Arts Building—a respite from the “blur of smoke and wind and noise” in the capital of the Middle Empire.
Kurt Vonnegut – Indianapolis, Indiana
KURT VONNEGUT The Kurt Vonnegut Museum & LibraryIndianapolis, IN By Laura Beadling Like many, I found and loved Kurt Vonnegut somewhere in my miserable teenage years. Slaughterhouse-Five is now one of my favorite novels to teach, whether in Great American Books or...
Ted Kooser – Seward County, Nebraska
TED KOOSER Gravel RoadsSeward County, Nebraska By Matt Miller For all his stature as former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser remains a poet of Nebraska, and so he is a poet of gravel roads. Consider “So This Is Nebraska,” his best-known poem about his home...
John Joseph Mathews – Osage County, Oklahoma
LiteraryLandscapes: Tallgrass Prairie Preserve—Mason Whitehorn Powell on John Joseph Mathews, Osage identity, and becoming a part of the balance in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Robert Hayden – Detroit, Michigan
LiteraryLandscapes: Paradise Valley—Ayesha K. Hardison on artistic signs and negative space in Robert Hayden’s Detroit, Michigan.
William Least Heat-Moon – Columbia, Missouri
Literary Landscapes: River-Horse Pavilion—Kit Salter on departure, preservation, and William Least Heat-Moon’s journeys across America.
Langston Hughes – Lawrence, Kansas
Literary Landscapes: John Edgar Tidwell on Langston Hughes, the merry-go-round, and social segregation in Lawrence, KS
Kate Chopin – St. Louis, Missouri
Literary Landscapes: 4232 McPherson Ave.—Michaella A. Thornton on parenting, criticism, and Kate Chopin’s final home.
F. Scott Fitzgerald – St. Paul, Minnesota
599 Summit Ave.—Ross K. Tangedal on transitions, mediocrity, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul, glittering with the newness of life.
Helen Hooven Santmyer – Xenia, Ohio
Greene County Courthouse — Jacob Bruggeman on civic pride and the settler colonial legacy of Helen Hooven Santmyer’s Xenia, Ohio.
Wright Morris – Central City, Nebraska
Wright Morris Boyhood Home, Central City — Nathan Tye on “the ache of a nameless longing” that comes with inhabiting a worn-over world.
Edgar Lee Masters – Petersburg, Illinois
Ann Rutledge’s Grave—Jason Stacy on lost love, Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, and exhuming the legends of Petersburg, Illinois.