The Books of the States: Minnesota (10 electoral votes; Guest: Matt Weiland)
"I think we stand up pretty well against other similar-sized states!" That's how Matt Weiland summed up his Minnesota top 10 to me when he sent it in, an act of unconscionable hubris that will no doubt be punished by the gods of Midwestern modesty. Such celebrating in the end zone no deserves a 15-yard-penalty on the kickoff, and even perhaps a disciplinary meeting with the commissioner, but we'll let it slide. This project is, after all, about local pride, as shameful as it might be to express it. Let the other "similar-sized states" make their own claims for the prize of "pretty well" and then we'll just see who's still standing...
Matt is, of course, along with Sean Wilsey, one of the editors of State by State--it's just chance, or the nonlinear settlement patterns of the United States, that leads us to have the home states of the two editors of the book, one on the West Coast and one in the Midwest, back-to-back. Matt's a Minnesotan, who now lives in Brooklyn, where just in the past month he has joined Ecco, the publishers of State by State, after being an editor for The Baffler, Granta, and The Paris Review (and coediting, with Wilsey, The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup). He put the Minnesota piece in the book in the hands of his fellow native Philip Connors, though, whom he also consulted in putting the state nominations below together, and whose explanation of the foundations of "Minnesota Nice" in the shame of its early white settlers is worth quoting here:
Our shame originates in poverty, in the squalid conditions our Northern European ancestors fled in search of a life with dignity. Many of them made good on that chance in Minnesota in the face of locusts, prairie fires, bad weather, isolation, and a hundred other challenges we can no longer imagine. To speak ill of them--to speak ill of anyone--is to mock their dignity, the thing they earned to our lasting benefit. They arrived in the New World wanting to be left the hell alone to do their work. In return for that courtesy they'd leave you alone too.
I'll let Matt's introduction below speak for his list, but I do want to mention how stumped I was in choosing a representative Minnesotan for the quarter above. Fitzgerald, the brilliant New York-bound son? Berryman, whose praises Matt sings below? As I did with Connecticut, I ended up punting and making two quarters, featuring two distinctive 20th-century mugs (and hairstyles!) who are deeply tied to the Gopher State.
Here's Matt with more:
Minnesota has as vibrant a literary culture as any state in the union, with an energetic publishing scene (including Graywolf Press, Milkweed Editions, and Coffee House Press), a first-rate public library system, and a public radio empire that takes books and readers seriously. When I was growing up in Minneapolis in the 1970s and 80s, two of the finest independent bookstores in any state were a short drive away: Odegard's and the Hungry Mind. Alas, both are gone, but Magers & Quinn and Birchbark Books in Minneapolis and Common Ground in St. Paul have filled the void.
All of this has made the state fertile ground for writers. It's no accident that Minnesota has given rise in recent years to novelists like Charles Baxter, Leif Enger, Siri Hustvedt, Walter Kirn, Arthur Phillips, and the late Jon Hassler; to memoirists like David Carr, Patricia Hampl, Bill Holm, and Samuel Hynes; and writers who cross genres like Robert Bly and Philip Dray. Their work will someday make anybody's list of ten books that do Minnesota proud. (Two other writers long identified with Minnesota whose work would certainly make my list are Louise Erdrich and Thomas McGrath. But both are equally identified--or more so--with North Dakota, and we Minnesotans are nothing if not polite--so I'll leave them to our North Dakota selector.)
In the meantime, with thanks to my fellow Minnesotan Philip Connors for talking some of this through on I-94, here's mine, in chronological order:
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920): The Sauk Centre native's affectionate kiss-off to its smug provincialism and "large capacity for dullness and contentment," the disease he called the Village Virus. "I shall have to write a book of how it getteth into the veins of a good man and true," Lewis confided to his diary more than decade before he wrote his biting and very funny book. He did, and it's a doozy.
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925): Books by Fitzgerald, who was born and raised in St. Paul, could fill most of this list, and it's tempting to add at least This Side of Paradise, The Crack-Up, or The St. Paul Stories, a collection edited by Patricia Hampl and published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. But Gatsby is Gatsby, dammit.
- Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rölvaag (1927): The classic saga of nineteenth century Norwegian immigrant life on the prairie, which The Nation hailed as "the fullest, finest and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America." Less Little House on the Prairie than Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. Set in what was then the Dakota Territory, mainly, but Rolvaag taught for decades at St. Olaf, the excellent college in Northfield, and his book was required reading in Minnesota high schools when I was growing up.
- Collected Stories by J.F. Powers (1947ff; collected 2000): Powers taught for many years at St. John's University, the Benedictine-founded liberal arts college in Collegeville, seventy miles north of Minneapolis. His stories are as dry and austere as that landscape, but like Alice Munro, the lives he describes are as rich and melodious as the finest chamber music.
- The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1954 Box Set by Charles M. Schulz (1950-1954; collected 2004): Has anyone, in any form, captured Minnesota's geographic, emotional, and psychic distance from everywhere else as well as Schulz, the St. Paul native whose first cartoons appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press? Nope. David Michaelis's recent biography, Schulz and Peanuts, is also superb.
- The Dream Songs by John Berryman (1964; 1968; collected 1969): We Minnesotans may be polite but we're also stubborn, and I'll argue this point with anyone: The Dream Songs is not only the best book of poems by a Minnesota writer, but the best by any American since the Second World War. Born John Smith in Oklahoma, Berryman lived a peripatetic life until settling in Minneapolis in 1955; he lived there until 1972, when he jumped off the charmless Washington Avenue Bridge to his death. There is no memorial there, a fact I hope someday to convince the Minneapolis mayor's office to fix. All help welcome.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (1974): Pirsig was born and raised in Minneapolis, and attended the University of Minnesota (he even edited the university's literary magazine). It was there that he wrote the classic 1970s "inquiry into values," in which he and his young son set off on a motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco. "The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower." Right on!
- We Are Still Married by Garrison Keillor (1981): Keillor discovered the New Yorker magazine in his hometown Anoka Public Library in 1956. "To me it was a fabulous sight, an immense glittering ocean liner off the coast of Minnesota." A little more than a decade later his stories were reclining in the fancy chairs on the decks of the great ship itself, and they were first collected in this, his first book. Anyone who tries to pass Keillor off as "just a radio man" (a great one!) or a "humorist" (no shame in that!) is itching for a fight: he is a Great American Writer through and through.
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990): O'Brien was born in Austin, grew up in Worthington and graduated from the University of Minnesota before being drafted into the infantry and shipped off to Vietnam, where he served for two years. It's tempting to include his excellent later novel, In the Lake of the Woods (1994), perhaps his most Minnesotan. But Things, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, remains a paragon of linked-story form, with something of the grandeur and pathos of Hemingway's In Our Time. It remains one of the best books about Vietnam.
- Chronicles, Vol. 1 by Bob Dylan (2004): Where else can one find the Hibbing native confessing his love for "the bittersweet, lonely world of Harold Arlen" and his fellow Minnesotan singer, Frances Gumm--better known by her stage name: Judy Garland.
- See all of our state posts
- Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
- Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
Andrea on November 25, 2008 at 10:01 AM
I can't believe you left out the Betsy-Tacy series of children and YA books by Maud Hart Lovelace. A charming depiction of life in small-town Minnesota (with periodic sidetrips to the Twin Cities for culture and shopping thrown in) in the first decades of the 20th century, this series has introduced generations of American girls from other parts of the country to the "Land of 10,000 Lakes."