These United States

John Leonard
November 2003     ISBN: 1560252855

Eighty-one years ago The Nation launched a series of forty-nine articles by a distinguished, skeptical and contentious group of writers--novelists, journalists, educators, social workers, lawyers, unionists, maverick intellectuals--each of whom had been asked to contemplate his or her state of the union. Their essays, short but not at all sweet, were collected and published in two volumes, in 1923 and 1925, as These United States: Portrait of America from the 1920s, less a symposium than a remarkably evocative crazy quilt of styles and apprehensions, moods and meditations, art and anthropology, reportage and polemic.

In 2001 a similar group of maverick minds were invited to pick up in the new century where the likes of Edmund Wilson (New Jersey), H.L. Mencken (Maryland), W.E.B. Du Bois (Georgia), Willa Cather (Nebraska), Theodore Dreiser (Indiana) and Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota) left off back in the jazz age. Ours is less of a jazz than a buzz age, so full of yak cable, white noise, disinformation and hypnotherapy that sorting out the signals to arrive at scruple, gravity or grace gets harder every day. Still, seeing and sorting is what these writers were asked to do, as well as tell us something we didn't know. What we received from Sherman Alexie (Washington), Annie Proulx (Wyoming), James Lee Burke (Louisiana), Tony Hillerman (New Mexico), Molly Ivins (Texas), Diane McWhorter (Alabama), Frank Conroy (Iowa), Charles Bowden (Arizona) was an eclectic selection of essays ranging from songs to sermons, polemics to personal history, cityscapes, landscapes and dreamscapes, which taken together form a unique, powerful and inspiring portrait of contemporary America.

"Leonard, a noted reviewer, editor and writer has edited an impressive new collection of 55 original essays for this new century.... An impressive host of writers, styles and structures are as diverse as the subjects. Michael Tomasky ponders West Virginia's sense of cultural insularity as a state teetering between North and South; Donald Hall mourns the sudden loss (from natural causes) of New Hampshire's emblem, the Old Man of the Mountain,; and Walter Kirn details the severity of Montana's economic privation. The Book is organized alphabetically by state, and reading from start to finish entails a series of interesting jumps, e.g., from Georgia to Hawaii or from Colorado to Connecticut. This choice is wise, for it allows each state and each writer to stand out."

--Publishers Weekly

"[These United States] is an innovative book, both informative and entertaining, that provides a unique look at 21st-century America."

--Library Journal

"These United States is the entire liquor cabinet: tingly, shocking, warming, dulling, uninhibited and intoxicating. In [Sherman] Alexie's words, it's all about 'the highly imperfect, woefully violent, and utterly magical place known as the USA.'"

--The Salt Lake Tribune

John Leonard reviews books for The Nation and Harper's Magazine, mixed media for CBS News's Sunday Morning and television for New York magazine. He has been editor of The New York Times Book Review and literary co-editor of The Nation. His books include Lonesome Rangers, When the Kissing Had to Stop and The Last Innocent White Man in America.