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    The Changing Times Guide to American Literary London London
    The Changing Times Guide to American Literary London London
    The Changing Times Guide to American Literary London London
    Ebook185 pages1 hour

    The Changing Times Guide to American Literary London London

    By Laurence Peters and Mike Peters

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Most of the major American writers  from Melville to Plath  lived in London for significant times in their lives. This guide writes about their time in the great city and how to visit many of their homes  their via the London Tube.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChanging Times Press
    Release dateJan 5, 2014
    ISBN9781497725058
    The Changing Times Guide to American Literary London London

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      Book preview

      The Changing Times Guide to American Literary London London - Laurence Peters

      Table of Contents

      INTRODUCTION

      William Burroughs

      Raymond Chandler

      James Fenimore Cooper

      T.S. Eliot

      Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Benjamin Franklin

      Nathaniel Hawthorne

      Washington Irving’s London

      Henry James

      Sinclair Lewis

      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

      Amy Lowell

      Herman Melville

      Edward Murrow

      Sylvia Plath

      Ezra Pound

      Paul Simon

      Gertrude Stein

      Mark Twain

      Edith Wharton

      Edmund Wilson

      Thomas Wolfe

      Further Reading

      The Changing Times Guide to

      American Literary London

      Laurence & Mike Peters

      Copyright © Laurence Peters & Mike Peters 2014

      INTRODUCTION

      We wrote this book to make American visitors to the UK aware of the London connections of some of their country`s great authors and to provide an informative guide to the homes they inhabited and the places they frequented. If you would like to get away from the well- trodden tourist sights of the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace etc. this book provides a real alternative – allowing you to visit some of the older and more out of the way parts of the city as well as to gain a sense of its influence on some of our nation`s most respected and influential writers.

      American writers came to London for the age-old reasons--money, wealth and fame - all in short supply at home, at least in the 19th century, when the country was far more appreciative of engineers and inventors than plain old wordsmiths. Yet material gain and recognition were not the only motives for making the transatlantic voyage – a voyage that was increasingly easier to undertake. To visit the metropolis was also to visit the home of tradition, civilization and culture; if America represented the present and the future, Europe, and especially London, with its palaces, castles and rituals, represented the past. Just as Europeans imagined the new world, so Americans imagined,and desired to experience, the Old.

      For writers, committed to the seriousness of their vocation, London often seemed preferable to their own cultural centers. Artists of all kinds in the US were regarded as idlers rather than productive members of society. While the US was being developed into an industrial powerhouse, London, however, was viewed by many as the artistic capital of the world and it had the art galleries, impressive homes, grand parks, museums, wide boulevards and libraries to prove it. Its size alone was overwhelming, surpassing its rival Paris after 1700 to become the largest city in Europe and growing exponentially throughout the 19th century from one million in 1810 to 4.5 million by 1901. The city’s streets and neighborhoods housed so much multicultural diversity, Disraeli was to call it a modern Babylon.

      But American authors, whether they believed in the artistic greatness of London or not, also knew that it was also the center of the English publishing world and that a large book and periodical buying public could make them, if not wealthy, at least able to support themselves as professional writers in a way that the US at that time could not. It should be noted that one key reason why American writers could not make a living in their home country was that the States lacked copyright laws and so their works were easily pirated. Established novelists such as Charles Dickens were furious at the Americans for allowing American publishing houses to avoid paying royalties. So, when in the early part of the 19th century, the Father of American Literature., Washington Irving, became the first American writer to make his living through his writing and was recognized by the British literary establishment, it served as a signal to his fellow Americans that one key route to literary stardom passed through London. The unstated assumption by the most ambitious American writers who flocked to the capital, was (to paraphrase the old song), to have made it here was to have made it everywhere. And make it they did. Few other cities can claim that they played host to so many great American authors as London. In fact, arguably, writers such as Irving, Cooper and Twain, who became popular on both sides of the Atlantic, were the first global best-sellers. Yet most Americans remain unaware of the fact that nearly every single major American writer, from Benjamin Franklin through to Melville, Twain, James, Eliot and Plath, spent a significant part, if not their entire working careers, in London. One American writer - Longfellow - was not just respected but was awarded a famed place in Westminster Abbey`s, Poet’s Corner, to rest alongside the great poets and monarchs of the realm and Franklin has his own museum to celebrate some of his most extraordinary achievements. The British respect and, in certain cases, veneration for American writers can also be seen in the number of blue plaques that adorn their former homes.. Partly as a result of this cultural recognition, we are fortunate to find that some of the century-old housing that these great writers enjoyed still stands today but often overlooked because of the embarrassment of other cultural riches that London offers.

      For lovers of literature there are many pleasures to be had from visiting the locations inhabited by some of the America`s greatest writers. Recognizing, for example, that Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis wrote two of their most famous novels – Look Homeward, Angel and Babbitt – during their time in London may cause us to read their books with somewhat different eyes. And, surely, no one can entirely separate Sylvia Plath`s poetry from the quietly civilized north London world within which her desperation and suicide are seeded.

      Nor should the importance of the capital`s landscape be overlooked. Working at Lloyds Bank close to the magnificent 17th century Hawkesmoor designed St Mary Wolnorth church must surely have inspired T.S Eliot`s Wasteland. The poet refers to how the church clock kept the hours as the crowds flowed over London Bridge with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. You can hear that dead sound as you view the current generation of city office workers flowing,

      over London Bridge, so many,

      I had not thought death had undone so many.

      Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

      And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

      Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

      To where Saint Mary

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