America250: Histories, Memoirs, and Travelogues - 20th and 21st Centuries

 

  One of the most often cited defining traits of Americans is restlessness.  From nomadic Native Americans to the European colonizers and immigrants crossing oceans to start new lives to space exploration, Americans have seemed to share the desire to move, to explore, to test frontiers, and to push boundaries.  That trait has inspired many contributions to a huge literary nonfiction genre, travelogues.  It's one of my favorite genres, especially the travelogues that blend history, memoir, encounters and conversations with a wide range of Americans, and keen observations about American history, culture, and attitudes.  This is the first of a series of posts about some of the books that fit this genre.  In some, authors re-trace paths of historic explorers, while some authors set out with a particular theme or mission in mind.  Some  are histories of famous treks in American history and the explorers who did the trekking.  A few are journals and primary accounts written by the actual participants, and there are a few works of fiction as well.

    Here's a selection of books from and about the 20th and 21st centuries.  It's nowhere close to an exhaustive list, just books that I've read and encountered.

From World War I to about 1970, some six million black Americans fled the oppression and terror of the Jim Crow South and headed North and West is search of greater economic and civil opportunities offered by industrialization and urbanization, spurred by two world wars.  This was America's Great Migration, and made a huge impact on American history, politically and culturally.  Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterpiece capturing that movement, told through the lives of several particular participants.  One outgrowth of the movement was the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black culture and arts beginning in the 1920s.  Two of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance were Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.  They were best friends and literary collaborators who road-tripped across the south collecting folk tales and stories.  Then, their relationship soured and they had a passionate and bitter falling-out.  Zora and Langston tells their story.  Imani Perry is a native Alabaman who left the South at a young age and returned many years later and documented her return, looking at the South with fresh eyes, in her book South to America.

The Great Depression was the impetus of many journeys.  Families packed up meager belongings and crossed the country hoping to find economic security.  Adults abandoned families and took to the road, and children were given up for adoption.  The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps my favorite novel ever, is the epic story of the Joad family making such a journey from the Dust Bowl ravaged Oklahoma to California.  Photographer Walker Evans and novelist James Agee traveled to the heart of the South to document the Depression's effects on the poorest, the tenant farmers and sharecroppers, whose lives were so deprived that they barely knew that the Depression was happening.  They published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, perhaps my favorite work of nonfiction.  Cotton Tenants is a sequel, not published until years later.  And Their Children After Them continues the story even further, catching up with later generations.  

 

I just mentioned what may be my favorite fiction and nonfiction works .  Now, it's time for what may be an unpopular opinion:  I know On the Road has supposedly changed lives and is a classic, yada yada.  I hate it.  It means nothing to me.  I don't understand any part of its fame and admiration.  But that's just my opinion.  If it speaks to you, that's OK; you do you, Boo.  Route 66 is perhaps the most legendary road in America, a part of American popular culture for 100 years now.  Michael Wallis' book is the definitive book about the highway.

What could be better than combining history, travel, and food?  Two books that do that exceptionally well are The Cooking Gene  and The Potlikker Papers.  Michael W. Twitty is a favorite food historian of mine.  In his first books he tackles the African Diaspora through food, tracing southern food - soul food - back to its origins in Africa and discussing regional differences and the transformations that occurred as African, European, and American Indian foodways mingled.  John T. Edge also tackles southern food in The Potlikker Papers, but he focuses on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  The movement brought large groups of people together, and segregation meant that most dining options were not accessible to participants.  The people needed to be fed, and, throughout the South, ordinary men and women made their contribution to the movement by stepping up to feed them out of their own kitchens and in their own homes.

 

Southerners just can't help themselves; they're genetically predisposed to tell stories. so there are lots of memoirs/travelogues that do that.  These are two really good ones, especially Rick Bragg's.  Bragg is one of my favorite writers ever.  Taylor Brown is a very popular current southern novelist.  My favorite Brown novel is The River of Kings.  The River of Kings by Taylor Brown is a novel that interweaves three timelines: two brothers kayaking down Georgia's Altamaha River to scatter their father's ashes, their father's life as a shrimper and drug smuggler, and the story of a 1564 French expedition to the same river, led by artist Jacques Le Moyne (discussed in previous travelogue post, pre-1800).  Having grown up near and fished on the Altamaha, Georgia's greatest river, this book really resonated with me.

Finally, a few miscellaneous titles, coincidentally, two of which were written by Colins:  I think Colin Quinn is funny, and I enjoyed his book.  Overstated is a humorous, loving roast of all 50 U.S. states, blending cultural stereotypes, regional idiosyncrasies, and political commentary.  In American Nations,  Colin Woodard argues that the United States is not a single, monolithic culture but rather a federation of eleven distinct regional cultures. These "nations" were established by different European settler groups whose unique values, religious traditions, and political frameworks continue to shape modern politics, voting patterns, and social attitudes today. The just-published  Monster of a Land by Lauren Hough is a travelogue and social commentary that updates John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, chronicling Hough's cross-country road trip with her dog, Woody, in a refurbished van. And that brings up to the first book that I mentioned in the first travelogues post, the Classics.  I'm looking forward to reading her take.