BOOKPATHS

Nevada, U.S.

Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Carson City, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1994; first published in 1883)

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1844-1891) provides a first person account of the injustices suffered by the Paiute Indians, from their first meeting with white men through their removal from their ancestral lands in Nevada to other locations in the western United States.  Her haunting narrative is Winnemucca’s “powerful legacy to both white and Paiute cultures.”

I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time.  I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country.  They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming.  My people were scattered at that time over nearly all the territory now known as Nevada.  My grandfather was chief of the entire Piute nation, and was camped near Humboldt Lake, with a small portion of his tribe, when a party traveling eastward from California was seen coming. – from Life Among the Piutes, by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

Online Edition

Nevada Historical Marker 143 – Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

Born on June 30th

John Gay
1685 in Barnstaple, Devon, England

Georges Duhamel
1884 in Paris, France

Winston Graham
1908 in Victoria Park, Manchester, England

Official Winston Graham Website

The Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society

Czeslaw Milosz
1911 in Sateiniai, Lithuania, Russian Empire (now Lithuania)

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1980

In Memoriam, University of California, Berkeley

José Emilio Pacheco
1939 in Mexico City, Mexico

Ferrara, Italy

Author Sarah Dunant writes about Ferrara, the setting of her latest novel.

The first problem I had when I started writing a novel set in a 16th-century convent in Ferrara was that my spellchecker kept trying to turn the city into a car. It was one of many realisations that this history-rich place on the banks of the River Po is one of Italy's hidden treasures. – from “As Fabulous as Florence – and Not a Coach Party in Sight,” by Sarah Dunant, The Guardian

Edinburgh, Scotland

Novelist Ian Rankin escorts Mike Wade “around the Edinburgh haunts of his famous fictional policeman.”

From the first of 17 novels, played out in the tunnels underneath the public library, to the last, a body at the foot of the castle rock, most have centred on two or three square miles of the city centre. – from “Times Literary Walks: Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh,” by Mike Wade, The Times

Listen to, or read, Bill Moyers insightful interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. S. Merwin.

Bill Moyers: To persuade a poet to depart from paradise, even if only briefly, requires a special kind of enticement. The acclaimed poet W.S. Merwin spent part of his childhood just across the Hudson River from our studios here in New York, but he lives now on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where every prospect pleases.

W. S. Merwin: I love the city, but I also love the country and I realize that when I'm in the city I miss the country all the time, and when I'm in the country I miss the city some of the time. So what I do now is live in the country and go to the city some of the time. – From Bill Moyers Journal Website

Born on June 29th

Giacomo Leopardi
1798 in Recanati, Papal States (Italy)

John Bach McMaster
1852 in Brooklyn, New York, USA

James Harvey Robinson
1863 in Bloomington, Illinois, USA

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1900 in Lyon, France

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Website

John Willard Toland
1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA

Vasko Popa
1922 in Grebenac, Serbia, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia)

Cid Corman
1924 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA

James K. Baxter
1926 in Dunedin, New Zealand, USA

Oriana Fallaci
1929 in Florence, Italy

Slawomir Mrozek
1930 in Borzecin, Poland

Florida, U.S.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston  (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008; first published in 1937)

Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford on her journey of self-discovery through three marriages, finally finding the kind of love she longs for when she meets and marries “the roustabout” Tea Cake in her early forties.  Descriptions of people and place pull readers into the pages, from the “West Florida” landscape of Janie’s birth and youth; to Eatonville, the "all-black" community where the author grew up; to the Everglades, where “hordes of workers” gather to cut sugar cane and beans in season.  Hurston's classic novel is a memorable and enriching read.

To Janie’s strange eyes, everything in the Everglades was big and new.  Big Lake Okechobee, big beans, big cane, big weeds, big everything.  Weeds that did well to grow waist high up the state were eight and often ten feet tall down there.  Ground so rich that everything went wild.  Volunteer cane just taking the place.  Dirt roads so rich and black that a half mile of it would have fertilized a Kansas wheat field.  Wild cane on either side of the road hiding the rest of the world.  People wild too.  – from Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

Zora Neale Hurston: the Official Zora Neale Hurston Website

Welcome to the Town of Eatonville: the Oldest Incorporated African American Municipality in America

London, England

Peter Ackroyd follows in the footsteps of William Blake.

William Blake is a master spirit of London. He is a great Cockney visionary who saw the infinite world, the fiery world, in the streets of the capital. He understood, and helped to fashion, the symbolic presence of the city. – from “Times Literary Walks: William Blake’s London, by Peter Ackroyd, The Times

Born on June 26th

Antoine de Rivarol
1753 in Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France

Bankim Chandra Chatterji
1838 in Naihati, Bengal, India

Bankim Chandra Chatterji Biography

Bernard Berenson
1865 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Russian Empire

Villa I Tatti

Martin Andersen Nexø
1869 in Copenhagen, Denmark

Sidney Howard
1891 in Oakland, California, USA

Pearl S. Buck
1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, USA

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1938

Pearl S. Buck Birthplace, West Virginia

Pearl S. Buck International: Opening Doors to the World

Zhenjiang Pearl S. Buck Research Association

Aimé Césaire
1913 in Basse-Pointe, Martinique

Hommage à Césaire

Laurie Lee
1914 in Slad, Gloucestershire, England

Charlotte Zolotow
1915 in Norfolk, Virginia, USA

The Official Charlotte Zolotow Website

Colin (Henry) Wilson
1931 in Leicester, Leicestershire, England

Colin Wilson World

Yves Beauchemin
1941 in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, Canada

Burma (Myanmar)

In a 2002 article, Steven Martin traveled to George Orwell’s Burma.

I first read 'Burmese Days' on the night train between Rangoon and Mandalay in 1997. Once I finished the book, I returned to the preface and began reading it over again. Since then, the novel has become one of those books I reach for when I have some spare minutes and crave an escape from work. Parting the pages and rereading a passage or two, I always notice some new detail or revel anew in one of Orwell's astonishingly timeless observations. When Orwell describes how 'a tuktoo clung to the wall, flat and motionless like a heraldic dragon,' I know exactly what he is talking about: as a writer living in northern Thailand, which shares much of the flora, fauna and culture of Upper Burma, I once shared a house with several of these ugly but harmless tropical geckos. It was tempting to think that something of what inspired Orwell to write 'Burmese Days' might still exist. History and politics have long kept Burma isolated and underdeveloped—was it possible that landmarks from Orwell's novel had survived to the present day? Would the locals have heard of him? These and other questions were on my mind when I applied for the visa in Bangkok that day. – from “Orwell’s Burma,” by Steven Martin, Time

Related Website

Burmese Days, by George Orwell -- Online Edition