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Stanford Report, December 7, 2015

Stanford professor connects American authors to the places that inspired
them

From Minnesota to Texas, Frederick Douglass to Walt Whitman, Stanford
English Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin guides readers through the sites
that shaped our greatest writers.

BY NATE SLOAN
The Humanities at Stanford <http://shc.stanford.edu/>

Terrell Dempsey
<http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/december/images/15927-places_news.jpg>

The Welshman's House, mentioned in Mark Twain's *The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer,* is one of the literary landmarks featured in Shelley Fisher
Fishkin's new book. The building in Hannibal, Missouri, now houses Jim's
Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center Museum.

One might not expect a book by an English scholar to stir in its readers an
impetuous desire to drop everything and take a road trip.

But a new atlas of American letters by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
<https://english.stanford.edu/people/shelley-fisher-fishkin>, professor of
English and director of the American Studies Program at Stanford, should
see many people throwing a stack of novels in the backseat and hitting the
highway.

Fishkin undertook an unprecedented study to explore more than 150
historical sites in the continental United States and assess how they have
been reflected in the works of some 200 American authors.

Fishkin – one of the foremost scholars on Mark Twain and also known for her
polymath work on journalism and fiction, literature and racism, and theater
history – said her goal was to map the "physical places that shaped the
lives and the art of authors who had a major impact on American literary
history."

The fruits of that labor are contained in Fishkin's new book
<http://www.writingamerica.org/>, *Writing America: Literary Landmarks from
Walden Pond to Wounded Knee *(Rutgers University Press), nearly two decades
and countless drives and flights in the making. Each chapter of *Writing
America *focuses on a different constellation of authors, places and
literary themes, introduced through images and excerpts from the writers
discussed.

Fishkin, the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities at Stanford, offers
nuanced interpretations in her book that connect the physical place and the
written word in each case. When landscape and literature meet in *Writing
America*, the life and work of great authors light up as in vivid
Technicolor.

Take Hannibal, Missouri, the small town where Mark Twain was raised, whose
economy now "runs on Twain tourism." Visitors to the Mark Twain Historic
District not armed with *Writing America* might come and go unaware of the
debates over how to represent the legacy of slavery in Hannibal.

Fishkin highlights the Welshman's House, mentioned in *The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer*, which now houses Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center,
which confronts the erasure of Hannibal's slave-holding past and the
century of segregation after slavery was abolished.

Thus, a humble building becomes a pivot point for readers to understand in
a new light the fierce and complex debates around race and nation that
continue to be stirred up by Twain's novels.

Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation
Act, Fishkin's book comes at a particularly valuable time, she says, for "a
renewed appreciation of both the rich diversity of the works American
writers have produced, and the value of historic preservation."

New voices

Canonical authors are far from the only figures profiled in Fishkin's
study; a desire to engage the diversity of voices heard in American
literature in the 20th and 21st centuries motivated her selection of sites
and authors.

For example, Fishkin says literature can help us to "comprehend what being
held, for often seemingly interminable periods, at the Angel Island
Immigration Station" meant to so many would-be immigrants from China in the
early 20th century.

Whether "through the lens of Maxine Hong Kingston's prose in *China Men*"
or "Genny Lim's drama in *Paper Angels,*" and even in "the poetry that the
aspiring immigrants themselves carved on the barracks' walls," literature
helps us understand the lasting resonance of that place, she said.

"If we want the past to live and breathe and if we want to understand the
ways in which it continues to suffuse the present, we must read it through
the powerful and luminous poetry and prose of imaginative writers," said
Fishkin.

Fresh connections

Fishkin presses into the service of literature sites that are on the
National Register for their place in the history of technology and or
business history. For example, Fishkin connects for the first time a
historic irrigation pump house in the Lower Rio Grande Valley with the work
of a leading Chicano poet and essayist. And she demonstrates that a North
Carolina house that was once home to the inventor of Pepsi-Cola is also an
important hitherto unknown link to a key work by Mark Twain.

Fishkin did not have to leave home for all her research. At Stanford, she
said, "Green Library yielded a treasure trove of materials for me, from a
beautifully illustrated German edition of Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld's
poems about working in the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side" to "a
first edition of Whitman's 1855 *Leaves of Grass* to Lawson Fusao Inada's
poems about the Japanese internment experience, *Legends from Camp*."

The book includes research Fishkin conducted for her earlier books on race
and racism in American literature, gender issues and ethnic identity, as
well as her experience as a faculty fellow of the Clayman Institute and as
an affiliated faculty member of Jewish Studies, African and African
American Studies, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and
Ethnicity.

Fishkin also noted that discussions with students in classes she taught at
Stanford, such as *Race and American Memory*; *Race, Gender and Ethnicity
at the Turn of the Century*; *Transnational American Studies*; *Feminism
and American Literature*; *The American West*; and *Mark Twain and American
Culture*, sharpened her thinking about issues of race, American identity,
slavery and American memory.

In *Writing America*, Fishkin hopes readers will gain a sense of "how
literature can enrich our understanding of history and of places where
historical events took place."



-- 
McAvoy Layne
ghostoftwain.com
Email: [log in to unmask]
PO Box 4522
Incline Village, NV 89450
775-833-1835

Diligently train your ideals upward toward a summit
where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct,
which while contenting you,
will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.
-Mark Twain