Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009
From Amerigo Vespucci to Darryl Zanuck
By Larry McMurtry
A New Literary History of America
edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1,095 pp., $49.95
So farewell then to Spiller, Thorp, Johnson, and Canby, whose durable Literary History of the United States has led at least two generations of graduate students through the complexities of The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam and other sometimes less than mesmerizing tales. Why goodbye? Because there's a new posse in town, of scholars and critics more than two hundred strong, led by those savvy sheriffs Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. This gifted group is here to guide us through our American story, using, when possible, the words of those who lived it, one of the earliest and most influential of whom was the merchant-sailor Amerigo Vespucci, who had been to the West Indies at the beginning of the sixteenth century and was eager to go back and find the vast treasure that Christopher Columbus had so far been unable to locate.
Review, 2897 words
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