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Authors and Their Hometowns
From 'To Kill a Mockingbird' to 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn', authors from all eras have pulled from their hometown experiences to create great literature. Hosted by Meredith Vieira, this program explores how the hometowns of great authors have influenced their writing and their stories.
TRANSCRIPT
Authors and Their Hometowns,
the companion documentary to
THE GREAT AMERICAN READ,
is made possible in part by
The Corporation for Public
Broadcasting,
a grant from Anne Ray
Foundation,
and by contributions to your
PBS station from Viewers like
you.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Meredith Vieira,
host of The Great American
Read.
They say to write what you
know,
and what does anyone know
better than the town they grew
up in.
Great books can give us a look
at the hometowns of the
authors that we love.
Join us as we hear how authors
shine a light on their
hometowns in some of our
favorite books.
When we think about certain
authors we think about the
home towns they wrote about.
When we think of Charles
Dickens, we think of London.
When we think of the Brontes,
we think of the Yorkshire
Moors.
When we think of Jane Austen,
we think of what she described
as her favorite subject for a
novel: three or four families
in a country village.
Exactly the kind of place
where she herself grew up.
F.
Scott is going to make me feel
like I'm up Long Island.
J.
D.
Salinger is going to make me
feel like I'm around rich kids
in New York City in a way that
I probably am not super often
in real life.
I didn't write about Ireland,
my own country,
until A History of Loneliness,
which was my fourteenth book.
And, y'know,
that's two in a row now that
I've written set in Ireland,
so that's a change.
Why do you think that is?
I think in the early years I
felt that A,
I felt I didn't have a story
particularly that I felt
passionate about something,
and I also felt intimidated by
it.
Cause most Irish writers do
write about Ireland.
And my imagination just seemed
to be taking me away from
Ireland.
And I wonder was there some
sort of subconscious fear of
jumping into that
territory-would I be able to
do it.
I wrote 5 books that were not
about Long Island before I
wrote a book about Long Island
because to me,
I never thought about the Gold
Coast,
I never thought about the
Hamptons, it was just there.
It was the forest,
and I didn't see it because I
lived with it all my life.
But once you start thinking of
it differently then you
realize that this is
interesting territory.
Writers are really at good at
making places come alive
because places are where
writers first come to life as
writers.
And especially writers who are
writing about where they grew
up.
They are writing about the
places where they first became
observers of the real world,
and of the social world.
Pulitzer Prize winning author
John Updike best known for his
novel Rabbit Run emerged as
one of America's best known
writers of the 1950's and
60's.
The heart of Updike's writing
beats in his hometown of
Shillington near the city of
Reading in Berks County,
Pennsylvania.
Shillington was a very
important place for the first
18 years of his life.
This house was the center of
his existence.
His stories centered fictional
version of Shillington,
and it expressed the deep deep
nostalgia that Updike felt
about this area.
This was his ideal of a place
to grow up.
Even though he kept saying
that he was going to stop
writing about Pennsylvania,
he really never did.
He was just drawing back to
it.
In A Soft Spring Night in
Shillington,
this wonderful essay that
begins his memoir Self
Consciousness he walks around
these streets that meant so
much to him.
And he comes in front of this
house and he looks up and it
and he says as a successful
older person it seemed blunt,
modest in scale, simple,
but he also said it possessed
a precious mystical secret
that this is the place in all
of the world that the core
secret of his creativity,
his inspiration was located.
In looking at To Kill a
Mockingbird Harper Lee's book
takes place in a town very
much like she grew up in.
Her community was somewhat
based on people she knew or
again kind of an amalgamation
of that.
And I think what starts to
happen is for the reader is
that there is a sense of it
being true.
It may not be nonfiction.
It may not be perfectly
accurate but we can relate to
it and that that kind of depth
of knowledge comes through in
the book and we see our own
communities in that book,
we see our own hometowns in
how they craft their story.
And when I was in high school
I was assigned to Kill a
Mockingbird as most people are
in high school and I went home
and I read it in a night.
I could not stop reading it
was so fascinating to me it
was.
I grew up in St.
Louis which has an interesting
racial history and I just
didn't want to put it down.
It felt like somebody had
written about a childhood
experience that I could really
relate to.
Maycomb was an old town,
but it was a tired old town
when I first knew it.
.. There was no hurry,
for there was nowhere to go,
nothing to buy and no money to
buy it with,
nothing to see outside the
boundaries of Maycomb County.
But it was a time of vague
optimism for some of the
people: Maycomb County had
recently been told that it had
nothing to fear but fear
itself.
One of the fantastic things
about James Baldwin I think
especially for people who are
interested in New York City
or, who live in New York City,
who know it and love it,
is that he is the
quintessential New York City
writer.
Most of his novels actually
take New York as a specific
character with real life and
verve.
And also interestingly enough
James Baldwin was a person who
spent much of his life also in
France.
But he always needed to come
back to New York in order to
find that.
.. I don't know the way to say
it.
Maybe that root,
that Inspiration,
that source for him.
He needed to go back to
Harlem,
he needed to be in the
Village,
he needed to be in the streets
of the city,
but they always were sort of
overwhelming to him.
In Another Country,
he captures New York and with
such rigor it has this ability
to transport you into the
space.
And when I remember thinking
of you 'when I went to come to
New York when I want to move
here' my references are James
Baldwin.
The prose is beautiful,
but it's just like clear,
honest and very concise on why
we love New York but also like
why we can hate it too.
Also,
why we want to challenge it
and make it better.
In Another Country,
he captures New York and with
such rigor it has this ability
to transport you into the
space.
And when I remember thinking
of you 'when I went to come to
New York when I want to move
here' my references are James
Baldwin.
The prose is beautiful,
but it's just like clear,
honest and very concise on why
we love New York but also like
why we can hate it too.
Also,
why we want to challenge it
and make it better.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was
written by Betty Smith and she
actually did grow up in
Brooklyn.
And she did live in a tenement
where outside there was this
small tree that she watched
struggling struggling to grow.
And along with that story was
her own personal story of a
very difficult upbringing
including her parent's
alcoholism and joblessness and
things like this.
Her mother was really
struggling to keep the family
together.
Her father was struggling to
keep himself together,
and she the narrator was
really struggling to keep
everybody together and just
keep her head above water and
survive.
There's a tree that grows in
Brooklyn.
Some people call it the tree
of heaven.
No matter where it's seeds
fall,
it makes a tree which
struggles to reach the sky.
It grows in boarded up lots
and out of neglected rubbish
heaps.
It grows up out of cellar
gratings.
It is only tree that grows out
of cement, it grows lushly,
survives without sun,
water and seemingly without
earth.
It would be considered
beautiful except that there
are too many of it.
And that's why that image is
so part of our cultural
consciousness of this tree
struggling through the cracks
of the pavement.
And at the end we see it's
still there when she returns
and that is the hope that not
only this tree survived,
but it shows that this little
girl survived as well.
One of the things that we have
to think about,
and I've heard many different
writers say different versions
of this,
is that you have to conceive
of the whole world that you're
in first.
That you may be following the
lead of the characters you're
going to create in that
setting but there is some way
in which you understand the
world itself fully.
For my writing to be effective
and my characters to be well
realized I really need to
spend a lot of time
cultivating a sense of place,
a really complex multifaceted
sense of place.
So I can't write about the
people that I'm writing about
unless I understand very
deeply and intimately the
places in which they live.
For me setting has always been
one of the first things,
one of the first pieces that
come into place.
Well you want to write a book,
it doesn't really matter where
you set it.
The important thing is pick a
point, get started.
So I said fine, Scotland.
18th century.
So that's where I began.
Knowing nothing about Scotland
or the 18th century,
having no plot, no outline,
and no characters,
and nothing but the rather
vague images conjured up by
the notion of a man and a
kilt.
I would really love to live in
100 years of solitude.
It's in a jungle,
it's in a remote very remote
village.
And Macondo is the name of the
village.
When you go there there is
this really vivid cast of
characters, there is war,
there is love, there's music,
there's fighting,
there's making up,
there's so much drama and
intrigue and told every story
very richly and you just want
to go in there and walk
around.
The Call of the Wild written
by Jack London is a book about
a dog named Buck.
So Jack London was born in San
Francisco but he grew up in
Oakland California.
And in fact when he became a
young man and went was part of
that Gold Rush he went to the
Klondike,
he went to Alaska and was
digging for gold and had to
have seen lots of sled dogs
and the story started to form
out of that experience.
The sled was a quarter of a
mile away.
Dog and Man watched it
crawling over the ice.
Suddenly they saw its backend
drop down as into a rut and
the people with a howl hanging
onto it jerk into the air.
Mercedes screamed came to
their ears.
They saw Charles turn and make
one step to run back and then
a whole section of the ice
gave way and dogs and humans
disappear.
A yawning hole was all that
was to be seen.
The bottom had dropped out of
the trail.
John Thornton and Buck looked
at each other.
You poor devil said John
Thornton and Buck licked his
hand.
The setting of The Grapes of
Wrath is the Dust Bowl in
Oklahoma and then the travel
from that that devastation to
California which was kind of
the land of opportunity.
And their great hope for the
future.
And Steinbeck captures that
gritty day to day struggle so
perfectly.
Death in the Afternoon" by
Ernest Hemingway.
Very interesting about the
culture in Spain,
and so many of the rituals
that are attached to
bullfighting.
Death in the Afternoon by
Ernest Hemingway.
Very interesting about the
culture in Spain,
and so many of the rituals
that are attached to
bullfighting.
I really helped me when I went
to my one and only bull fight
in Mazatlán, Mexico in 1979.
Where the Red Fern Grows was
one of the most impactful
books that I read in my
childhood.
Wilson Rawls wrote about a
time in a place that he
actually experienced as a
child.
So he wrote about the Oklahoma
Ozarks,
which is where he grew up and
his family was forced to leave
that place and so he wound up
being pushed out of this place
that he loved,
and so it makes perfect sense
to me that he returned to it
on the page in a way that he
might not have been able to in
real life.
And if he had never been there
or had only been there for
vacation or something like
that there is no way he would
be able to tell that story of
use the landscape to tell that
story in the way that he did
and infuse it with long and
nostalgia and safety and fear
and all the things that the
book talks about.
Emily Bronte of the three
Bronte sisters was the one who
was the most impatient of any
kind of social convention.
She just wanted to do what she
to do,
and what she wanted to do was
her art.
And she found the Moors to be
a place that inspired her,
because they were full of
subtle drama and In Wuthering
Heights the Moors are a space
of freedom
I had this vision of Emily
Bronte and her family all you
know storming across these
Moors with their dresses
dragging in the mud and
sitting down in these cold
stone rooms writing furiously.
Wuthering Heights is the name
of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling,
Wuthering being a significance
provincial adjective,
descriptive of the atmospheric
tumult to which its station is
exposed in stormy weather.
Some authors make settings
external expressions of how a
character is thinking or
feeling you know they might
have something take place in a
weird Gothic House because the
character is weird
psychologically unstable
person.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier,
it's one of my favorite novels
to recommend because the
setting is one gigantic house.
And you get it in the first
sentence.
'Last night I dreamt I went to
Manderley, again.
' You're like,
what is Manderley,
what is that,
what is going on.
And it's I mean Manderley does
become a character.
I know it sounds cliché to say
it that way but it does it's
this hulking dragon of a
place.
The house knows the truth of
what happened,
knows the truth of Rebecca,
knows the truth of Maxim,
knows the truth of pretty much
everything in terms of the
plot.
When you're reading it the
house contributes to the
mystery of the story and
that's how you know you're in
for something really good when
everything is working together
and nothing feels sort of
haphazard or random.
That appetite for seeing with
your own eyes that roof or
that view and that water makes
it even more real even though
it's a novel it's set in a
real place.
It's not necessarily a true
story and yet because when we
read them they're true for us
we want them to be really true
in the world.
And so seeing the actual
landscape where it took place
makes it so.
When a novel as loved as and
if Green Gables is known to be
in an actual place that
obviously builds a world of
tourism around that place and
people so many people that I
know have travelled to see the
actual place on Prince Edward
Island and to go to this sort
of little compound where you
can just love everything that
is Anne of Green Gables.
Almanzo Wilder roamed these
grounds as a farmer boy in the
1980s.
His childhood was immortalized
in a Little House book written
by his wife Laura Ingalls
Wilder.
The Wilder homestead is sort
of a second home.
Knowing that there is this
historic connection to
something that I was involved
in very personally.
..it's a special place.
The organization Literary
Libraries named the homestead
a landmark in 2015 Folks this
is the entrance to the big or
the middle barn as it's
referred to in the book.
The series,
the movies the books are part
of my life.
I'd like to have an impact on
seeing it be successful moving
forward.
As a Long Islander after
having read The Great Gatsby I
had a great desire to tour all
of the Gold Coast mansions.
20 miles from the city.
A pair of enormous eggs
identical in contour and
separated only by a curious.
.. Her to see bay.
..twenty Miles from the city.
A pair of enormous eggs
identical in contour and
separated only by a courtesy
Bay jut out into the most
domesticated body of saltwater
in the Western Hemisphere.
The great wet barnyard of
Long Island Sound.
I did actually have a really
cool experience recently where
I got to go see the house that
inspired little women.
So where Louisa May Alcott
lived when she was growing up
and it was walking through the
book.
You're walking through it.
And it made me love the book
that much more,
it made me appreciate the book
that much more it probably
elevated it closer to a
favorite than it had been
before because I got to see
Beth's piano in the corner.
I got to walk through the
rooms where the stories were
told,
I got to see Amy's paintings
on the fireplace and in the
rooms.
I got to see the desk where
Louisa May Alcott or Joe got
to sit and write her works.
It really it felt so real.
I read that book probably 20
times or seen the movie as
many times,
but to actually go there and
feel the texture and the space
of the place to be able to
walk into a book like that is
something really unique.
I was very very blessed and
lucky to get the opportunity
to travel to Devon on a tour,
and the thing that inspired me
the most about being there is
that it really does capture
your imagination when you're
reading Agatha Christie,
but also when you're there,
it really is almost a literal
translation of what she is
seeing.
She brings a lot of what I
feel as,
in terms of discovery.
I feel she brings a lot of
those experiences,
both as a child and as an
adult, into her writing.
From reading Into the Wild,
I decided i wanted to go on a
journey myself into the woods,
but what I learned is I wanted
to be prepared,
that is my personal
connection.
I am not going to be like this
guy Alex or Chris.
I am going to be prepared when
I start my journey.
Stephen King's The Stand which
Maine features as always in
his books in this great
wonderful way as the kind of
it's like the heart of the
book that people are working
their way towards.
I think so I'm only halfway
through.
It's my guess.
And it really makes me want to
go to Maine.
I've never been there since I
was a student and I always
think 'God I got to go back
there one day' whenever I read
Stephen King.
People talk about the idea
that a writer should write
what he or she knows or that
they should write from the
place they're coming from.
I think that that can be
great,
but I also think it's
limiting.
I mean I think that a writer
should be able to write
outside his or her own
experience in the same way
that a reader should be able
to read a book outside of his
or her own experience.
I've liked to read ever since
I was a youngster because it
was a way to discover new
worlds and I could do that at
my own pace,
and learn more than I can find
in just everyday living.
One of the things that I am
most jealous of that other
writers are able to do is to
create their own settings,
their own worlds.
Creating a magical world of
fantastical world is harder
than creating a world than of
your backyard.
So because anything can
happen.
And one of the things about a
fantastical world is reading
the book and being able to
live in that world let your
imagination expand it be a
part of it,
give it the color and depth
and richness that is as rich
as your imagination.
You can experience a totally
different world,
you can time travel In
Outlander you can go into
Charlotte's Web and feel what
it's like living on a farm
with this cute little pig and
this whole story of life on
this farm.
It could just remove you from
whatever you're going through
in your life.
One author that really has I
guess brought me to a
different place and kind of
transformed some of the ways
that I think about literature
was J.
R. Tolkien,
his trilogy The Lord Of The
Rings.
And he kind of just transports
you to a totally different
place and you kind of just get
absorbed in this world and
this struggle for the ring by
using poetry, music,
the use of his languages,
developing a whole language of
Elvish to kind of cohesively
bring the story of Frodo
Baggins and his adventures.
It's just a phenomenal
trilogy.
When we think about Alice and
Wonderland,
she's a little girl and she's
really bored with her lessons.
She' s imagining these
different places and she ends,
well we don't know that she
ends up falling asleep,
but she ends up falling asleep
and she follows this rabbit
that seems to hop by her
during her lessons and she
tumbles down a literal rabbit
hole and goes into a totally
different world.
And it's just a very different
thing to just sort of imagine
a different place and how an
author could come up with that
and I have to image I think
they do it for themselves in
addition for the reader.
Stories have the ability to
take the author somewhere that
they couldn't go before.
That's long been what stories
can do in a far off land.
This is a wonderful place you
can feel like you're in Mordor
or you can feel like you go to
Hogwarts.
Tolkien's sends me to Middle
Earth and George R.R.
Martin sends me to Westeros.
The fantasy in SciFi authors
that have put me in outer
space and in fantastic worlds
that only exist in their
imagination,
that they kind of let me in
to,
have always been really
important to me.
Tolkien's sends me to Middle
Earth and George R.R.
Martin sends me to Westeros.
I've always been a weird
awkward anxious person.
Way more comfortable with
characters in books than I am
with people in the real world
and any author who can make me
feel less lonely and less
weird and give me an escape
from like feeling so
uncomfortable in my own skin
is a person who as far as I'm
concerned is a magical wizard.
When authors draw from their
personal life and their
personal experiences you can
tell that there's a different
heart in there and there's a
different sentiment that you
can pull from it like that's
able to connect with the
reader in a way that that
books that don't have that
heart to it just don't.
Inevitably we're exploring
ourselves even if we're
writing about you know
Martians or people who live on
Jupiter that we're exploring
different parts of our
imagination and our and
different parts of our
personality.
I am gratified as a reader
when I see writers rigorously
engaging with what they know
A novelist writing about a
place they know and a place
they know in their bones will
deliver a better story because
they can deliver a better
place and the more that you
can make your reader forget
that they are on the page and
let them feel that they're
actually in that place the
better.
And when you are familiar with
the space you can rub against
it and create friction and
unpack different ideas.
And also it's a space that you
love too
In a few lines you can think
aha I totally get what makes
that place work and what makes
these characters act and feel
and live and love the way they
do.
Authors across generations
have drawn from their hometown
experiences to create great
literature.
It's the sense of community
and a profound sense of place
that ground every story.
I'm Meredith Vieira.
Thanks for watching.
Authors and Their Hometowns,
the companion documentary to
THE GREAT AMERICAN READ,
was made possible in part by
The Corporation for Public
Broadcasting,
a grant from Anne Ray
Foundation,
and by contributions to your
PBS station from Viewers like
you.
Thank you