Book of the week: A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

Readers who accept the challenge of pouring through the 200-plus essays in this 1,096-page book will be taken on an historical tour that is “richly surprising and consistently enlightening.”

(Belknap/Harvard, 1,096 pages, $49.95)

No, this isn’t “a history of American literature.” When the 200-plus essays in this ­volume were commissioned, say the book’s editors,­ the ­collective mission was to trace how the inhabitants of our “made-up” country have spoken to one another about who we are. Contributors were asked not to limit their gaze to the dusty books on their shelves, but to address the “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being.” So Ishmael Reed wrote about Huck Finn, but historian Merritt Roe Smith focused on the Winchester rifle. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne, and rock critic James Miller lionized Chuck Berry. As for the opener, could there be a better subject than the 1507 map on which the word “America” first appeared?

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