A Journey Through American Literature (review)

This book represents a departure of sorts for Kevin J. Hayes, omnivorous Americanist, author of highly readable intellectual biographies of American figures such as Franklin and Jefferson, Melville and Poe, editor of essential companions to American literature and preeminent bibliographer. A Journey Through American Literature is just that: a topically arranged walk, with a knowledgeable and entertaining guide, through a varied landscape made from almost four centuries of American letters.

The journey is neatly arranged by genre: travels, autobiography, short story, poetry, drama, and novel, with these chapters bracketed by an opening essay on "Beginnings" and a closing essay on "Endings." But within each chapter Hayes gives himself the latitude to wander into interesting byways, bringing the reader along. In the first twelve pages of "Beginnings," for example, he invites the reader to consider American literature's prevalent theme of identity through a wide-ranging catalogue of familiar opening lines from the nineteenth (Narrative of the Life of Arthur Gordon Pym, Moby Dick, Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Huckleberry Finn, Leaves of Grass) and twentieth and twenty-first centuries (The Invisible Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Namesake). That the question of identity weaves itself through different and sometimes competing sets of American belief systems— consumerism, individualism, self-reliance— that are themselves pillars of the American Dream is the burden of the remainder of "Beginnings," which agilely tracks these systems through another dozen or so texts of all sorts from early Colonial to near-contemporary, plausibly and provocatively.

If I spend so much time on "Beginnings" it is because this chapter sets the tone for those that follow. "Travels" begins with the reminder that "once the initial work of colonization had been completed, American authors could traverse the colonies less as explorers and more as urbane travelers." Among these early urbane travelers, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd, and William Bartram penned influential literary accounts of journeys in the interior and abroad, preparing the way for homely and exotic travelers from Thoreau to Theroux. Westward expansion produced other and diverse kinds of travel writing from the multi-authored History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to first-hand accounts by men and women of travels along the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon trails and the exciting account by John Wesley Powell of his Exploration of the Colorado River. Among nineteenth century travelers abroad Hayes gives pride of place to accounts by Henry James and Mark Twain, but he also manages to cast his eye upon less familiar travelers, or writers not primarily viewed as travel writers: Richard Henry Dana, William Wells Brown, John William DeForest, Nathanial Hawthorne, Lucy Bainbridge, Charles Dudley Warner, Herman Melville, George Kennan. In the twentieth century, Hayes reminds us, in addition to the homely travels of Steinbeck and the exotic excursions of Theroux, we may find the humble wpa guides for our states, written by the likes of Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston.

For Americans, travel is not a far reach conceptually from autobiography— we are a peripatetic people, and American lives and travels are inextricably bound up in the experience of racial contact and conflict that weaves its way through American history. Thus, in his chapter on autobiography and under the auspices of Franklin's pattern-setting autobiography, Hayes attends to America's wealth of captivity and slave narratives as well as autobiographies spiritual and secular and, curiously, "Jazz," all the while inviting the reader to ponder questions of authenticity in relation to autobiography and the autobiographer's self-conscious construction of identity in the terms of that dominant strain in American letters that Hayes laid out in "Beginnings."

Each subsequent chapter performs the same operation upon its subject. And each chapter turns up nuggets— interesting juxtapositions of texts, many of them familiar but effectively defamiliarized by Hayes's bundling of them. Other, less familiar, items beg to be considered. As I read nearly every chapter I found myself wanting...