Writings
Ohio and Ohio Valley writers and writing, literary and cultural history with occasional ventures into the greater Midwest and Upper South.
“Autumn” from Sherwood Anderson’s “Home Town”
Autumn—the mellow golden time of falling leaves, cider, apples, and pumpkins. The year’s decline and a farewell to summer’s heat and languor. Long hazy days, the time of “mist and mellow fruitfulness.” In the great Midwest the trees are in color and the corn and soy are harvested, leaving bare fields full of stubble to…
CONTINUE READINGA Quiet Place of Powerful Tribute: The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana
Dana, Indiana is farm country, the kind of Midwestern land where fields stretch to the horizon, where a state route below the blazing summer sun feels like it’s going to roll forever through endless rows of corn and soy all the way to the Pacific, and when you stop the car and pull over you…
CONTINUE READINGA Free Soul Bound For Jail: Eugene Debs Speaks in Canton, Ohio–June 16, 1918
June 16, 1918 was a warm summer day in Canton, Ohio. The Socialist Party of Ohio had gathered in the city for its yearly convention. On this day, in Nimisilla Park, the speaker was arguably the best-known Socialist in America: Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. Debs’ progressive credentials were impeccable. By this time he…
CONTINUE READINGA Better Book There Never Was: Jim Tully’s “Shanty Irish”
If you ever watched Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series about the Civil War, you might recall hearing excerpts read from a book called “Co. Aytch.” “Co. Aytch”: A Side Show of the Big Show (the title refers to the author’s unit–Company H) is the memoir of an eloquent and perceptive Confederate soldier named Sam Watkins. Margaret…
CONTINUE READINGSome Books of 1917
1917 was a watershed year for the United States. In April of that year the United States finally entered the First World War, which transformed the nation. By the war’s end 4,743,829 men and women were mobilized into service, 53,513 were killed in combat, and 63,195 were dead from disease and other causes. There were…
CONTINUE READINGJames Whitcomb Riley’s “Little Orphant Annie”
James Whitcomb Riley’s “Little Orphant Annie” is one of the Hoosier poet’s most beloved and well-known poems, one which has endured and become part of the folk memory of generations of Americans. “Little Orphant Annie” stands alongside “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,” “The Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole,” and “When The Frost Is On The Punkin” as…
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