A Journey Through American Literature

Hayes (English, Univ. of Central Oklahoma; The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson) takes the reader on a journey that is impressive in scope but necessarily limited in depth. In his time line at the end of the book, Hayes starts with a 1608 work by John Smith and concludes with Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. He attempts to cover the territory between those works as he considers everything from travel literature to autobiographies, short stories, poetry, drama, and novels. The pace is somewhat frenetic as he discusses, thematically, Mary Rowlandson's famous 1682 captivity narrative and only a few pages later comments on DNA scientist James D. Watson's autobiography of almost 300 years later. In the chapter on short stories, he spends about as much time on the work of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet as he does on that of Ernest Hemingway. Given the shortcomings of such a cursory view, Hayes offers some provocative statements that might spark debate or motivate further reading. In his chapter on drama, for example, he considers the writers of The Simpsons as among the most creative in America today.