A Hoosier Holiday
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By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over twenty years. When his friend Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiserâs response to Booth was immediate: âAll my life Iâve been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it.â Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiserâs early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his one year at Indiana University.
âBecause [the book] provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiserâs journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map.â âPublishers Weekly (starred review)
âThough far from the authorâs usual musings, this is actually a forerunner to the American road novel and very well could have been one of the inspirations for Jack Kerouac . . . this is a fine addition to public and academic libraries.â âLibrary Journal
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Theodore Dreiser authored realistic portrayals of life in the United States. His two best known works are Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, but he wrote over 15 other booksâof fiction, travel, autobiography, poetry, plays, science and politics.
Franklin Booth studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Student's League in New York. Best known for his intricate and precise drawings, he was a founder of the commercial art movement. His drawings appeared in magazines ranging from The Masses to Good Housekeeping.
Douglas Brinkley, Director of the Eisenhower Center for Leadership Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and NPR poetry editor, is the author of such award-winning books as Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-1971, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (with Townsend Hoopes), and Majic Bus: An American Odyssey.
