BOOKPATHS

Worthington, Minnesota, U.S.

“Novelist Tim O’Brien revisits his past to come to terms with his rural hometown.”

A few months ago, when I paid a return visit to Worthington, a deep and familiar sadness settled inside me as I approached the town on Highway 60. The flat, repetitive landscape carried the feel of eternity, utterly without limit, reaching off toward a vast horizon just as our lives do. Maybe I was feeling old. Maybe, like my father, I was conscious of my own lost youth. – from “From Brooklyn to Worthington, Minnesota,” by Tim O’Brien, Smithsonian Magazine

St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul on September 24, 1896 and lived in the city “at various times and in multiple locations until 1922.”  The St. Paul Public Library offers information about their native son, including a printable walking tour and map of Fitzgerald’s “homes and haunts” in the Summit Avenue area and in downtown St. Paul.  Included on the route, and pictured to the left, is the apartment building where Fitzgerald was born.

Another guide, with photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald St. Paul sites, can be found at http://home.comcast.net/~caudle2/fscotwlk.htm.

Saint Croix Valley, Minnesota and Wisconsin, U.S.

Nestled between Minnesota and Wisconsin in a picturesque valley, the St. Croix River flows between bluffs of limestone and sandstone, beginning as a narrow gorge with steep vertical walls, then slowing and widening into the scenic Lake St. Croix. -- from Explore the Scenic St. Croix Valley Website

Saint Croix Notes, by Noah Adams (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2001; first published 1990)

Originally written during 1988 for his Saturday evening "St. Croix Notes" broadcast on Minnesota National Public Radio, Noah Adams's essays celebrate people and place, with musings on nature, weather, history, daily life, and adventures in the St. Croix River Valley of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

I've read that already ice-skating on the lakes could be dangerous.  Because at the middle of February the sun's light is higher from the sky, more intense, making the ice less reliable.  The declination of the sun is thirty-two degrees now, in January it was twenty-four.  Also people who keep track of such things would not be surprised to hear that the first crocus has broken through the snow.

The winter may have lost its crunch, but there's no spring green, no purple, no flash of yellow or orange to be seen as yet.  We have grays and browns and somber evergreen, the white and black birch trees standing, crookedly, in holes in the snow, which is melting.  I make a few snowballs to throw up in the air to the dog, who tries to catch them as he does his tennis ball.  But the snowballs go away when he catches them, and he can't find them on the ground." -- from "February 20," Saint Croix Notes, by Noah Adams

Publisher's Website

Northern Minnesota, USA

A Place in the Woods, by Helen Hoover (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; first published in 1969)

In 1954, Helen Hoover and her husband, Adrian, moved from a settled existence in Chicago to “the wilds of northern Minnesota.” In A Place in the Woods, Hoover describes their early years in the wilderness, recalling “near disasters,” “moments of rare beauty,” and how they slowly adapted to the “rigors” of their chosen place.

In the days of the Great Depression we had cheered ourselves with dreams of a hideaway cabin of our own and had started looking for the place on the first vacation after our marriage, more than a dozen years before this one. Somewhere along our way we had come to feel that our cabin should stand in forest that had reached maturity in its own way, but we had found that accessible virgin timber not government- or corporation-owned was rare indeed. We had grown, not discouraged, but less hopeful as the years and the miles passed. Now I thought of the pines just behind us, saw the lofty crowns of others in the forest we were passing through. Perhaps we could find our place and spend a little time there. – from A Place in the Woods, by Helen Hoover

Publisher’s Website

Bookpath: Minnesota, United States; Sweden

Emigrant Novels (Book I: Emigrants; Book II: Unto a Good Land; Book III: The Settlers; Book IV: The Last Letter Home), by Vilhelm Moberg (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995; originally published between 1951 and 1961)

Vilhelm Moberg’s four-volume saga traces the lives of “a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Småland in 1850” as they journey to the United States and settle in Minnesota.

For great stretches the lush green growth hung over the lake and no one could make out where the ground ended and the water began. Farther out the bay was full of birds – ducks, swans, and wild geese in such multitudes they might have been strewn from heaven by generous hands. From the shore could be seen a thick wall of tall elms. At first Karl Oskar had thought it was the opposite side of the lake but when he rowed out in his holed-out canoe along the shores he had discovered it was a wooded island, with still another great island beyond. He had discovered the Ki-Chi-Saga consisted of seven small lakes, connected by narrow channels so that the shores formed a confusing and ever straying coil. This was a lake landscape, a conglomeration of islets, peninsulas, points, inlets, bays, necks, headlands, isthmuses. Each islet, bay, or tongue of land had another islet, bay, or tongue of land behind it.

It took a long time for a settler to know this lake. – from The Settlers, by Vilhelm Moberg

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

Vilhelm Moberg Website

Bookpath: Sauk Centre, Minnesota

Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home and Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center

Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota on February 7, 1885. To the displeasure of Sauk Centre residents, the town served as Lewis’ inspiration for Main Street, a “satirical novel of small-town life.” Today, however, he’s celebrated in his hometown. His boyhood “two-story, wood-frame” home welcomes visitors Memorial Day through Labor Day and the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center is open all year. Both the home and museum share memorabilia and information on the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, while a walk down “the original main street” still evokes the Sauk Centre of Sinclair Lewis’ life and work. Lewis’ gravestone stands in the family plot in Sauk Centre’s Greenwood Cemetery.

Related Websites

Sauk Centre Herald – Sinclair Lewis

Sauk Centre

BOOKPATH: Madison, Minnesota

Letters from the Country, by Carol Bly (New York : Perennial Library, 1988; a more recent edition was published by The University of Minnesota Press in 1999)

Rooted in Madison, Minnesota, Letters from the Country, by Carol Bly, reaches beyond local observations to wisdom all of us can share. Written in the 1970s, the essays in Letters from the Country are surprisingly current, offering ways to look at the world that benefit the individual, the community, and the country. Bly's "letters" encourage a self-awareness that nurtures political activism. She also encourages a grounding in literature as a way to be "informed of how the others do things, how quietly other kinds of life are lived, how other molecules behave in quite other circumstances from the ordinary...." You may not always agree with Carol Bly, but she will always make you think about and clarify your own ethics during these challenging times.

"We need a thousand more things to ruminate about together out here. We need conversations that take in the moral aspect of things as well as their money-making aspect. It will bring to the countryside a sorely needed gentleness." -- from Letters from the Country, by Carol Bly