The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s

by Alexander Nemerov

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691244273
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Series:	Bollingen Series , #66
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	83 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This is a wonderful book, Sebaldian, digressive, moving and shocking and beautiful. It is an extraordinary achievement.”—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

"The Forest by Alexander Nemerov is one of the richest books ever to come my way. In deeply beautiful, achingly painful, and astonishingly tender prose, he describes the rape and taking of the American forests and the destruction of the country’s natural ecology. Nemerov is a master craftsman who constructs shapely sentences and paragraphs like handsome architecture.”—Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Shipping News

"Nemerov writes with a poet’s precision and wildness. He tells the stories gently and quietly and ferociously all at the same time. This is a whole breathtaking world conceived through the presence and specter of trees. In the end, one might just say that this book is a prayer.”—Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being

“Nemerov is the consummate poet of the past, steering history writing in a new direction through the power of his language. His images come from art history, popular culture, and history, but many are borne aloft only through the visual suggestiveness of his descriptions.”—Michael Ann Holly, author of The Melancholy Art

“The Forest is a series of richly imagined, gemlike tales that capture the worlds of nineteenth-century Americans. Born of tactile sensations and inspired by nature, this is literature as a kind of cultural history. Nemerov has forged a new genre of writing, prompting us all to think about the hidden fictions within our own efforts to reconstruct the past. Reading this extraordinary book made me love the nineteenth century anew.”—Angela L. Miller, coauthor of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity

Editorial Reviews

Clarke Peters has a distinctive, resonant voice. He performs this multifaceted audiobook authoritatively with a good ear for story and a fine pace. His careful diction works well with the collection of sketches, profiles, historic moments, and interludes on art history that author Nemerov has brought together and defined as a fable of the 1830s. His revealing discussion of what happened to hemlocks shows his appreciation of the environmental costs of the era. His insights into the decade's art and personalities--from naturalist David Douglas (of fir tree fame) to Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel F.B. Morris, and Andrew Jackson--bring the listener a deeper understanding of this seminal period when our forests were mostly ravaged, New York City burned, and the Hudson River School of painters emerged. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

June 2023 - AudioFile

"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."

New York Times

"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

From the Publisher

★ 2022-10-25
Beguiling study of American intellectual and cultural life two centuries ago at the places where forests and civilization met.

“Reading books, filling in the blanks with my imagination, I sought to restore the stories of the figures in the original I had not seen, which itself was a record of what the chronicler-carver perhaps only dreamed when he invented the life of his times.” So writes Stanford humanities professor Nemerov of a mysterious carved box that, long ago, poked its way out of a streambank. It’s not the only mystery in the pages of this luminous book. Another is the odd vision of a figure painted in the crook of a tree high above a Virginia forest floor, both startling and delighting its discoverer, who took the opportunity to “ponder the fact that his imagination gave rise to such phantoms.” Nemerov is a collector of such forest-born visions. Some are exalted, as when, early in this episodic, anecdotal narrative, Nathaniel Hawthorne finds in the New England woods a metaphor for his work. “For him,” writes Nemerov, “trees were brains, arbors of thought, much like his own.” Some are economic: Groves of hemlock are felled in order to cure livestock hides, with a noxious load of acids and blood dumped into a pristine Hudson River. Some are ominous: Nat Turner retreats to “a self-secluded place in the woods” to plan his uprising of enslaved people. Nemerov delights in turning up surprises that inform his pointed tales. His discovery of the story of David Douglas, who lent the Douglas fir his name and whose life ended tragically in a trap meant to protect gardens from rampaging cattle, is a feat of scholarly detection. So is his restoration to history of an Irish immigrant who, sadly, fell from an elm he was trimming, a narrative frame within which the author discusses anti-immigrant sentiment.

A lively history of the early republic, its branches coming together to form a sturdy whole.

Kirkus Reviews