Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. His many books include Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York and Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (Princeton).
A vivid historical imagining of life in the early United States
"One of the richest books ever to come my way."-Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Shipping News
"This is a wonderful book. . . . An extraordinary achievement."-Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters-such as Thomas Cole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner-are well-known, while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs.
The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths or go their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For Alexander Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions of the people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs, The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.
Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC "For each scene, {Alexander Nemerov} seems to have asked himself not merely how things would have looked in the 1830s but also how they would have sounded, felt, tasted and smelled. The Forest is easily one of the most pungent books I've read, an encyclopedia of vintage odors. . . . After you've read this book, most other cultural histories will seem as stale as the straw on the floor."---Jackson Arn, Wall Street Journal "This vibrant collection liberally envisions America's early cultural life through its forests, from Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom trees were 'arbors of thought,' to Nat Turner, who planned his rebellion while secluded in the woods." "I really wish I'd written this book. The Forest is what one might dubiously call 'a nonfiction novel,' taking as it does the lives, both real and imagined, of multiple early inhabitants of America's great forests-artists, tradesmen, farmers, poets, enslaved people-and turning them into fictionalized episodes. . . . This is history imagined as ecology."---Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub "{A} beguiling study of American intellectual and cultural life two centuries ago at the places where forests and civilization met." "Alexander Nemerov . . . brings {an} unruly and uncanny world to life in his new book, The Forest. Neither history nor fiction, the book unspools over dozens of gem-like stories of man's last real encounters with these ancient forests: Nat Turner's woodland hiding place, the inscription of the Cherokee language both on trail trees and on paper, Harriet Tubman's view of the Leonid meteor shower, the painter Thomas Cole's top hat of felted-beaver fur."---Stephanie Bastek, Smarty Pants podcast "{In} The Forest, readers have a chance to walk through the woods of the early 1800s-and discover that the often contradictory ways we relate to nature now have been with us at least since then. . . . {The book} peers closely at the art of the period in order to better capture how people then felt, thought and dreamed about themselves and the land."---Kiley Bense, I
