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And the War Came: An Accidental Memoir
"The prevailing mood of my early and Ann’s mid-fifties has been one
of the sense of an ending, surely, but more than that, of a gathering
urgency. . . . Fewer of the moments between us feel rehearsed, or
forced. And now, just as we had begun to glimpse something like
wisdom, glimmering over the horizon, the world smacks the hell out
of us. I am strangely grateful, even so, if only for the felt return, in
recent days, of the possibility of strong emotion...."
On the day of the terrorist attacks, a man begins writing down things
said by his family and friends. The trauma appears to have marooned
diarist David Wyatt in a shell-shocked present tense. But as he
experiences all of the emotions of that fall, he is visited by deep
memories that transform his daily journal-keeping into an
"accidental memoir," a narrative that reaches a surprising and
moving conclusion on Thanksgiving Day. Juggling the roles of
English professor, restaurant owner, husband, father, son, and friend,
Wyatt finds sustenance at the core of ordinary American life,
resources at once so available and so elusive. Passionate about
people, books, food, and landscapes present and lost—and
absolutely unheroic—the voices summoned here counter the
sanctimonious and the sentimental. Wyatt’s elegantly understated
memoir reveals how the events of September 11 affected ordinary
people and presents this anthology of thoughts, feelings, and
interactions in a frank and immediate voice.
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Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California
In this wholly original study, cultural historian and critic David Wyatt
uses the story of fire to tell the story of California. Wyatt focuses this
"catastrophic history" of his native state on five events that swept
through California, altering its physical and political landscape and
the way both were represented in art and literature. Wyatt begins
with the accidental importation and spread of the wild oat in the
1770s, a process that had its human counterpart in the Spanish
invaders. He then explores the impact of four other significant
events: the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and fire, the post-World
War II defense-industry boom, and the "fire of race" that erupted in
Watts in 1965. This fifth fire, Wyatt claims, has burned all throughout
California's history, and he artfully examines its effects on both the
Chinese immigration experience and the internment of Japanese
Americans in World War II. With an energetic style, Wyatt shows how
all of these events were recorded and responded to in the works of
the imagination that have shaped our collective understanding of the
Golden State, from the writings of Raymond Chandler and Amy Tan,
to the photography of Ansel Adams and the films of Roman Polanski.
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Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation
In a highly original study, David Wyatt takes a broad, yet personal,
look at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures
who came of age during the Vietnam War. Wyatt argues that it is
each artist's "personal engagement" with his or her own era that
binds together the achievements of storytellers such as filmmaker
George Lucas, songwriter Bruce Springsteen, playwright Sam
Shepard, journalist Michael Herr, writers Ann Beattie, Alice Walker,
Ethan Mordden, Sue Miller, and poets Gregory Orr, and Louise Gluck.
For some their work is marked by the war and concerned directly
with it; for others, Vietnam represents the prevailing counterculture
sensibility often associated with the sixties. Out of the experience new
voices emerge--from Michael Herr's landmark invention of a new
journalistic voice in his Vietnam War reporting to Bruce Springsteen's
tapping of the working class decline in postwar America. The thread
that ties the various genres and visions together and that which
constitutes Wyatt's own critical aesthetic, is the centrality of the
personal response and the seamlessness, therefore, of identity and
history.
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The Fall into Eden, Landscape and Imagination in California
In this book, David Wyatt examines the mythology of California as it
is reflected in the literature of the region. He argues that the
encounter with landscape played an important role in literature of
the West, and distinguishes this particular characteristic from the
literatures of other American regions. Wyatt discusses in depth the
writings of Dana, Leonard, Fremont, Muir, King, Austin, Norris,
Steinbeck, and Chandler, Jeffers and Snyder and their literary
reactions to the landscape. By examining the changing role of the
landscape in literature of California, the book sheds new light on an
important theme in the American creative popular consciousness.
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Prodigal Sons: A Study in Authorship and Authority
Using the parable of the Prodigal Son as its point of departure, this
critical study explores the tension between authorship and authority
in eight literary careers. The focus falls on the movement of mind
and imagination through each work, on the romance of
development and on writing as an activity of working through. Wyatt
provides readings of Henry James, William Butler Yeats, John Synge,
Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Agee, Robert Penn
Warren, and Robertson Davies.
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