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Imagining Boston : A Literary Landscape

Name: Imagining Boston : A Literary Landscape
Author: Shaun O'Connell
ISBN: 9780807051030

by Shaun O'Connell

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Overview

How writers living in and around the city contributed to America's rich literary heritage.

About the Author, Shaun O'Connell

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

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Editorials

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.

Booknews

O'Connell (English, U. of Mass., Boston) discusses not only the familiar Boston/Cambridge/Concord literary figures (from Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Updike, Cheever and Robert Lowell) but also authors of other roots and regions, including Edwin O'Connor, WEB Dubois, John Greenleaf Whittier, Norman Mailer, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)