Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807051020 ISBN 13: 9780807051023

Publisher: Beacon Press, 1990

Shows how Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Jack Kerouac, Henry James, and Malcolm X have depicted the city in their writings

About the Author:

SHAUN O'CONNELL, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and author of Imagining Boston, lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

From Library Journal:

An exhaustive but not exhausting survey of Boston-oriented writers from Hawthorne to Updike, this book examines how each writer, no matter how obscure, helps perpetuate or otherwise responds to Puritan John Winthrop's 17th-century vision of Boston as a moral beacon, a "City upon a Hill." Treatments of some writers may read like Cliffs Notes, but O'Connell pays serious attention to such relatively neglected figures as Santayana, Marquand, and Edwin O'Connor. Chapters on Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Robert Lowell are particularly illuminating. Recommended for American literature collections.
- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.