America: A History in Verse, Vol 1: 1900-1939

With Hymn to the Rebel Cafe (1994), Chekhov (1995) and 1968: A History in Verse (1997), Ed Sanders has developed a remarkable mode of "compacted history" (as one critic called it). Angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, these works offer a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic.In the present volume, Sanders embarks on his most ambitious project to date: an epic, neo-Herodotean finding-out-for-oneself of salient moments and movements in the public/private history of the American twentieth century. Bold, sweeping, data-retentive, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rending, thought-provoking, Sanders' History adds a brilliant new poetic patch to "the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds."And who am I, someone could ask, to writea history of America ?trained with my every breathfor 41 yearsto chant & sing, whisper, shout, keen, dance with joy& try to trace with gracewhat the Fates & Human Mammals have wroughtin the Time-Track of America(From the Introduction)A visionary longing for an earthly paradise of unviolated nature provides the poetic "fiction" which underlies Ed Sanders' dense fields of politically conscious factoids. His catalog of the obstacles to the fulfillment of that vision comprises a modern history of struggle, re-interpreted and illuminated by the imagination's light in each line of his poetic re-telling.