—Arna
Bontemps (birthplace in Alexandria, Louisiana; home and grave in Nashville)
—Willa
Cather (birthplace and sites in Back Creek Valley, near Winchester, West
Virginia; sites in and around Red Cloud, Nebraska; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
where she taught; Grand Manan Island, Nova Scotia, where she had a summer
cottage; her grave and other sites in Jaffrey, New Hampshire)—
—Checking
place names for Cather, I find online a story about her birthplace being up for
sale; the story originally appeared on 9 March 2010, coincidentally my father’s
birthday—he would have been 97. I printed the story, copied the photograph,
posted the item on Facebook—
—And
so many others: Kate Chopin (home in Cloutierville, Louisiana; relevant streets
of New Orleans; Grand Isle, Louisiana (a principal setting of The Awakening), grave in St. Louis and
other sites there); Stephen Crane (many sites around Port Jervis, New York,
where he grew up; Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he lived with his family; his
grave in Hillside, New Jersey); Emily Dickinson (home and grave in Amherst,
Massachusetts; her grandfather Samuel once worked at Western Reserve
College—now Academy—where I taught; he died here in Hudson, Ohio, in 1838);
Ralph Ellison (all his youthful residences in Oklahoma City are gone, but we
saw his grave in Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum near Riverside Park in
New York City); Ralph Waldo Emerson (home and grave in Concord, Massachusetts;
also Concord Bridge, where his poem “Concord Hymn”—with its famous line “the
shot heard round the world”—lives on a stone marker)—
—My
students were always moved by the story of Emerson’s despair over the early
death of his first wife, Ellen, in 1831, how he walked four miles, each way, to
her grave every morning, how, finally, more than a year later, he asked the
cemetery caretaker to open her grave; only when he saw her corpse, he believed,
could he finally accept her death. “29 March [1832]. I visited Ellen’s tomb
& opened the coffin,” he wrote in his journal.[1]
It was all he could say—
— William Faulkner (home and
grave and sites in and around Oxford, Mississippi; we drove and photographed
the route described in As I Lay Dying,
a book I regularly taught late in my career); F. Scott Fitzgerald (sites in Mobile, Alabama, Zelda’s home; sites
in Chicago and Lake Forest, Illinois, his girlfriend’s houses; sites in St.
Paul, Minnesota, where he grew up; Buffalo and Rochester, New York; his grave in
Rockville, Maryland); Robert Frost (homes in New Hampshire, Vermont,
Massachusetts; grave at Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont, one of the few
cemeteries we visited where signposts point toward the author’s grave); Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. (sites in his hometown of Piedmont, West Virginia, which we
visited a photographed when I was teaching his memoir, Colored People); Nathaniel
Hawthorne (Salem, Lenox, and Concord, Massachusetts; Raymond, Maine; grave in
Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery); Ernest Hemingway (sites around boyhood home
in Oak Park, Illinois; setting of “The Killers” in Summit, Illinois; sites
around their summer cottage, “Windemere,” on Walloon Lake in Michigan; sites in
Key West, Florida; his home and grave and other sites in Ketchum, Idaho)—
No comments:
Post a Comment