Winter Cold Moon
A long time ago, high school, maybe junior high, I decided that the way to get to know a people or a place was to read their literature. Of course, reading their literature and being in the place for some time is optimal.
When I moved to Minnesota, for example, I read Sinclair Lewis and Ole Rolvaag and F.S. Scott Fitzgerald and Vilhelm Moberg. Gave me a good grounding in the ethos, the thought world behind Minnesota. Now, were I to do it today I might add Keillor, Erdrich, some of the many mystery writers, but you get the idea.
Here’s the point of this. How much earlier American literature have you read? I mean, how well do you know us through the minds of our first novelists and story tellers. Say, Washington Irving. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville. or, Edgar Allen Poe. If you have read them, are you like me and that reading is far in the past? I’m going to start re-reading these guys over the next months. Getting back in touch with our thought world.
