Writing New England

The story of New England writing begins some 400 years ago, when a group of English Puritans crossed the Atlantic believing that God had appointed them to bring light and truth to the New World. Over the centuries since, the people of New England have produced one of the great literary traditions of the world--an outpouring of poetry, fiction, history, memoirs, letters, and essays that records how the original dream of a godly commonwealth has been both sustained and transformed into a modern secular culture enriched by people of many backgrounds and convictions.

Writing New England, edited by the literary scholar and critic Andrew Delbanco, is the most comprehensive anthology of this tradition, offering a full range of thought and style. The major figures of New England literature--from John Winthrop and Anne Bradstreet to Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Thoreau, to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Updike--are of course represented, often with fresh and less familiar selections from their works. But Writing New England also samples a wide range of writings including Puritan sermons, court records from the Salem witch trials, Felix Frankfurter's account of the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, William Apess's eulogy for the Native American King Philip, pamphlets and poems of the Revolution and the Civil War, natural history, autobiographical writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, Mary Antin's account of the immigrant experience, John F. Kennedy's broadcast address on civil rights, and A. Bartlett Giamatti's memoir of a Red Sox fan.

Organized thematically, this anthology provides a collective self-portrait of the New England mind. With an introductory essay on the origins of New England, a detailed chronology, and explanatory headnotes for each selection, the book is a welcoming introduction to a great American literary tradition and a treasury of vivid writing that defines what it has meant, over nearly four centuries, to be a New Englander.

From the Preface:

"Imposing one unitary meaning on New England would be as foolish as it would be unconvincing. Yet one purpose of this book is to convey some sense of New England's continuities and coherence...Not all the writers in this book are major figures (a few are barely known), but all are here because of the bracing freshness with which they describe places, people, ideas, and events to which, even if the subject is familiar, we are re-awakened."

Andrew Delbanco is the Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies and Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

There is nothing now in print quite like Writing New England. Three things make the book stand out: its enlargement of one's sense of the varieties of people who, over time, have inhabited New England; its insights into one region's contributions to the country at large; and its sheer readability. Strongly recommended.

Readers concerned that a New England anthology of writing would slip into mawkish paeans to autumn and Yankee wisdom should know that Delbanco does not shy from the darker aspects of our region and its history...Delbanco's business, at least in book form, has always been America--its culture, history and literature: whether he is anthologizing Emerson, Lincoln or the Puritans, or writing about American religion...Delbanco ensures that the path between past and present remains open and well-trod.

Writing New England is a readable, usable, invaluable gift to readers of American literature and to those who appreciate the virtues of anthology...The literary landscape in New England is precious in its beauty; harsh in its honesty, and soaring in its genius. Merely by possessing this book we stake a claim in the bounty.

Handsomely produced...[and] imaginatively done...[This] anthology succeeds admirably in conveying, in Delbanco's words, "how New Englanders have come to live in different and distinct regions of cultural inheritance." It manages also, in its inclusions and rediscoveries, to extend Thoreau's remark in his "Ktaadn" section from The Maine Woods printed here: "I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is."

Now arrives the definitive New England reader, a book written for the New England booster, the New England admirer, and, of course, that character indigenous to these parts, the New England reader...[Andrew Delbanco's] luminous opening essay distills one of the great truths about great New England writing: It is produced by 'the sort of mind that, with an acute sense of its own fallibility, seeks moral knowledge in the wisdom literature of the past.' But Delbanco's greatest gift is his sense of judgment. He knows, for example, that it is impossible to understand New England...without a passing acquaintance with Henry David Thoreau, Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--and, lest we forget, Henry Beston. He knows, too, that there is a difference between choosing the best known and the best representative selection of a writer's work...One of the great New England virtues, besides a sense of the vanity of human wishes, is thrift, and here Delbanco has produced a metaphor of the region. There is not a page wasted in this volume, not an entry without a reason.

A book to keep by the reading light for years to come...The selections are both expected old friends and eclectic new neighbors, each with an introduction that suggests how it adds to an understanding of "the New England mind."

This broad selection gives a deeper understanding of the flavor of New England writing, be it artistic, religious, legal, or political. Well-known writers, such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Dickinson, are balanced with writers less well known outside the region, and male voices are balanced by female. Introductory head notes to each section delineate the theme explored, placing the selections into context, while those for each selection provide biographical information and critical context.

Despite the proliferation of regional studies, particularly of the American South, there are relatively few collections of or studies about New England writing. Perhaps it's because New England was the original region. Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James are not generally considered New Englanders so much as Americans. Delbanco, a renowned scholar of the Puritan experience in America (author of The Puritan Ordeal), wants to call attention to the fact that these writers were not simply from New England but of it. In this beautifully conceived collection, Delbanco has interspersed with unchallenged figures such as Thoreau and Hawthorne a few pieces that have been all but lost to the general reading public...This is an excellent gathering of letters, poems, stories, essays and excerpts from novels and histories.

Who and what made New England the nation's intellectual and literary center is apparent in this expansive collection of writings by the abiding masters and luminaries of the day...[Writing New England] illustrate[s] the nuances of the "hope and disillusion, confidence and self-doubt" that inform the New England mind...In each [section], writers explore the attitudes and characteristics that came to define the region: an ideal of justice, an intolerance of newcomers, and a "proprietary intimacy" with the land...This [book] is a smorgasbord; we are unlikely to see its kind again soon.