Tuesday, August 21, 2007
'About your Boston reading list,' Part III
Stephen recommends more books for future consideration on the Boston Reading List:
I haven't read any of the three. Van Wyck Brooks' books sound great. One of my fill-in-the-gap fascinations about Boston is how a Puritanical society evolved into one that could produce the enlightened Emerson, Thoreau et gang. It's a mystery to me. ... FYI: Later, I'll put on Boston Reading List a note and links to all the recent readers' recommendations. No need to wait around for me to read them. ...
Stephen recommends more books for future consideration on the Boston Reading List:
Have you read Jean Stafford's "A Boston Adventure," published in 1944? It's the story of a young woman who grows up on the South Shore, working in a tourist hotel, who is "adopted" by a Back Bay brahmin and observes pre-WWII Boston culture from the inside. Stafford was married to Robert Lowell and A.J. Liebling, and won a Pulitzer Prize, and I think she's still worth reading though almost no one I know has ever heard of her.
Also, Van Wyck Brooks wrote 5 books about the growth of American Literature, of which 2 - "The Flowering of New England" and "New England Indian Summer" - have quite a lot of coverage of the Boston Literati of early and late 19th Century. I haven't read these in years, but I remember them being enjoyable.
I haven't read any of the three. Van Wyck Brooks' books sound great. One of my fill-in-the-gap fascinations about Boston is how a Puritanical society evolved into one that could produce the enlightened Emerson, Thoreau et gang. It's a mystery to me. ... FYI: Later, I'll put on Boston Reading List a note and links to all the recent readers' recommendations. No need to wait around for me to read them. ...
