Author J.D. Salinger, who passed away in 2010, wrote much of his work in the state of New Hampshire.
Robert Frost and J.D. Salinger wrote in New Hampshire. Robert Penn Warren and Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Iowa. Robert Lowell and Willa Cather are buried in New Hampshire. Hortense Calisher and Aldo Leopold are buried in Iowa.
These two states – lumped together primarily because this month they are the settings of the first two tests in the U.S. presidential election – have little in common. But they do share two important cultural qualities: They both have high literacy rates, and for decades, they both have been havens for writers.
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James Freedman, who served as president of the University of Iowa and the president of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, liked to say that he had academic appointments in two states that refuted the old chestnut that American literary history resided primarily in New York and Massachusetts.
In his years in Iowa City, the university created the Iowa Center for the Book. In his years in Hanover, N.H., Freedman, who died in 2006, wandered the open stacks of the college’s Baker-Berry Library in search of books – novels by Trollope and Stendhal, historical works by Macaulay and Trevelyan – that he somehow hadn’t read. And he maintained a collection of notable books by authors in both states.
Great literature came to Freedman’s native state of New Hampshire first, by virtue of the lure of the physical attributes that also inspired painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and Benjamin Champney. “For the first century and a half,” Robert Gilmore wrote in his 1981 New Hampshire Literature, “New Hampshire authors portrayed the land as both treacherous and bountiful, a paradox of danger and promise.”
That tradition persisted. Perhaps the quintessential New Hampshire story was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne who – though often identified with Salem, Mass., and The House of the Seven Gables – spent much time in New Hampshire, in part to visit with his lifelong friend, Franklin Pierce, born in the state and later the 14th president.
Hawthorne’s tale is called The Ambitious Guest and, like all his stories and perhaps half of all Granite State stories, it is a mortality and morality tale wrapped in a story of irony and destiny. Taking an actual 1826 landslide as his topic, Hawthorne spun a gothic tale about a family that fled its hillside cabin “where the wind was sharp throughout the year and pitilessly cold in the winter” to avoid the oncoming rocks – only to perish in the slide that spared the house.
Frost lived in New Hampshire and used its broad woods (”lovely, dark and deep”), its individual trees (”Tree at my window, window tree”), its stone walls (”Good fences make good neighbors”), and the country byways (”the road less travelled by”) as the natural resources of his poetry. And yet his poem bearing the title New Hampshire ends with this enigmatic sentence: “At present I am living in Vermont.”
Robert Frost lived in New Hampshire and used its broad woods, its individual trees, its stone walls, and the country byways as the natural resources of his poetry.MARTY LEDERHANDLER
Retired Supreme Court justice David Souter, a New Hampshire native, has taken to point students not to Frost’s most famous poems – Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Tree at My Window, Mending Wall and The Road Not Taken, all quoted above – but instead to bid them to linger on Two Tramps in Mud Time, which treats with blending “my vocation and my avocation,” prompting Souter to tell me, “That’s about the best career advice I can offer anyone.”
The tradition of Old Home Week began in New England, and the poet Edna Dean Proctor marked the 1899 event by saying, “Forget New Hampshire? By its cliffs, her meads, her brooks afoam, / With love and pride where’re we bide, the Hills, the Hills are home!”
Iowa’s altitude may be lower but its literary aspirations perhaps are higher, in part because of the legacy of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which since its founding in 1936 transformed the state into an unlikely retreat for serious writers.
“Very little literary history of the United States will be written without the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” David Dowling, a University of Iowa professor and author of the 2019 A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, said in an interview. “This has become one of the epicentres of literature. It may not be Greenwich Village in New York or Taos in New Mexico, but it has had enormous influence. It has become a fame factory.”
Paul Engle, the workshop’s second director, made it clear that the program was not a place for writers to dangle their toes in the Iowa River and dream romantic thoughts. Over the years the sessions have been known for a relentlessly rigorous curriculum, intense manuscript scrutiny, and, on one occasion, an actual barroom brawl. A man connected to the Workshop once questioned the reputation of Kurt Vonnegut during an argument in an Iowa City bar, prompting Vonnegut’s star student, John Irving, to deck him.
And though some writers have recoiled at the discipline and the male-oriented air that prevailed, Flannery O’Connor had a piquant reply when she was asked whether the workshops stifled young writers. She said she didn’t think they stifled enough of them. But under Engle and, later, Frank Conroy, a stream of writers has continually rolled into Iowa City, many of whom never wrote so much as a syllable about Iowa: Raymond Carver, Rita Dove, Allan Gurganus, Curtis Sittenfeld, W.D. Snodgrass, Willam Stegner, John Edgar Wideman.
One way or another, the Iowa bookshelf is broad and deep.
“There’s nothing about the corn and the soybean that produces writers,” said Stephen Bloom, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. “But it is a very long winter here and a very hot summer, and that can produce ruminations about the world.”
In Gilead (2004), Marilynne Robinson writes of Iowa having possessed “the kind of light that rests on your shoulder the way a cat lies on your lap.” In its companion book, Home (2008), she describes an Iowa house that had “begun to smell like Sunday” and speaks of an old church, now only a memory, “with the steeply pitched roof and the abbreviated spire.” And then there were the people “ready to believe anyone who tells them about, you know, his angel mother, and how the thought of her piety has been a beacon shining through the darkest storms of life.”
Robinson, who remains on the Workshop faculty, won a Pulitzer Prize and so, too, did Jane Smiley, whose A Thousand Acres (1991) describes how it is possible to stop at an Iowa country crossroads and see “no sign of anything remotely scenic in the distance” – and how it was possible in an Iowa childhood to have the conviction that “our farm and our lives seemed secure and good.”
And you don’t have to wade more than five paragraphs into the well-loved Shoeless Joe (1982), written by Alberta native W.P. Kinsella, to read of the “tattered lawn of mostly dandelions and quack grass that petered out at the edge of a cornfield perhaps fifty yards from the house.”
That, of course, would become the setting of the fantasy visit of the besmirched baseball star Shoeless Joe Jackson to Iowa and of the haunting phrase, appearing two paragraphs later and emerging as a major element of the iconic 1989 Field of Dreams film made from the novel, “If you build it, he will come.”
For a guilty pleasure, historically minded readers sometimes dip into the 1994 A Judge and a Rope, by George Mills, which has, among other beauties, the tale of Elmer Carlson, who won the 1935 world cornhusking championship and who took a roller-skating mule to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
But truly the greatest single work of Iowa literature may have been produced in 1938 by the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that sent writers across the United States in the depths of the Great Depression to produce history-oriented travel guides.
The Iowa volume, reissued in 1986 by the Iowa State University Press, is a special treat and an indispensable tool should you wonder, for example, how the community of What Cheer, Iowa, (population 1,339 in 1940 but only 599 now) got its name. (The verdict: It may be because that is what a group of Indigenous people said to a river-crossing early settler in a canoe.) An e-book edition of the New Hampshire Guide, also originally published in 1938, is available from Trinity University Press.
Perhaps the principal literary link between these two early political states is Bill Bryson, author of A Walk in the Woods, the classic 1998 account of his trek on the Appalachian Trail. Bryson, an Iowa native, traversed New Hampshire during that hike and for a time lived in the state, which he celebrated as “primarily, sometimes rather dauntingly, wilderness.”
Of his Iowa childhood, he wrote in his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), that his days “were so long and so little occurred [that] you were prepared to invest long periods in just sitting and watching things in the off chance that something diverting might happen.”
Then again, he could always pick up a book. Or write one. Many have, and did.
Editor’s note: Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly said author Bill Bryson lives in New Hampshire; this version has been corrected.