American Anti-Pastoral

THOMAS GUSTAFSON is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865. Born and raised in Brookside, he now calls Echo Park in Los Angeles his home.

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations


Prologue


Part I Dismal Harmony

1 The Office of Letters and the Bomb: Brookside and Old Rimrock

2 Fourth of July Parade

3 Indigenous American Berserk

4 Fig Leaf: The Voice of the Pastoral

5 Walled Garden




Part II Babel

6 All Babel Breaks Loose

7 Inside the Territory: Myth and History

8 Harmony: Bill Orcutt’s WASP History Tour

9 Dissonance: Bucky Robinson’s Jewish History Tour

10 Counterfactual: Beatrice and George Jenkins Sr.’s Black History Tour of Morristown

11 On the Dead-End Dirt Road: The Quiet Babel of Stoney Hill Road and Where Goodbye Newark Meets Goodbye Orchard

12 Brookside Bards: Steven Cramer’s Poetry of Protest and Christopher Merrill’s Poetry of Place




Part III Pentecost Remembered and Lost

13 Brookside against the Current

14 NIMBY: Protecting Green Space with Green Money

15 The Price of Harmony

16 The Table of Otherhood and Communion

17 The Community Club and Its Dissidents

18 American Pastoral and Revolutions of the Word

Epilogue: “The Great New Jersey Novel”: American Pastoral and the Garden State of Letters


Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index