We loved volume 1 in January From Once Upon a Time in America: A History of American Literature (Les Arènes BD), devoted to the 19th century and sponsored by the two publishers Olivier Gallmeister and François Guérif. In this anthology by Catherine Mory drawn by Jean-Baptiste Hostache, we found many anecdotes about James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Jack London, etc. Same pleasure with this voluminous volume II with a similar cast, just published. This time, the great American authors become witnesses to wars, the economic crisis, the anti-communist crusade and the Beat generation…
From Dashiell Hammett and the invention of the crime novel to the Southern Flannery O’Connor and her angry little whites, via Henry Miller, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote, we savor the parade of these sacred monsters through the boards and the humorous cartridges. If we except Mrs. O’Connor, we recognize many common points in addition to dysfunctional families: alcohol, sex, military engagement, travel to Europe… With, for all, like a refrain, this reflection from those close to them: “If you are a writer, you should have written Gone with the Windat least we earn money”. Money, they will end up earning some (notably Faulkner, Nobel Prize for Literature 1949, Hemingway the winner of 1954 and Steinbeck Nobel 1962), to spend it better… The Maltese Falcon, Tropic of Cancer, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the road, In cold blood, My pain comes from further awayfrom title to title, the memories come flooding back.
These are all the authors, and many more, that we find under the pen of the scholar Bruno Corty, forged by more than thirty-five years of journalism in Literary Figaroin his A Dictionary of American Literature (Plon). He has read everything, the devil, and offers us from Chris Adrian to Bob Zimmerman (Dylan),American Psycho has The Girl from the Motelfrom authors from Montana to those of the “new journalism” a panorama (subjective, of course) of the Yankee planet. Some of them, James Ellroy, Colson Whitehead, Richard Ford, Dan Chaon will also be present, alongside some 70 other writers, at the amazing America festival in Vincennes (to which Corty devotes an entry), which is held from September 26 to 29 and will this year be placed under the sign of dialogue between Europe and America while capital deadlines await the United States in the fall.