by Jeff Sharlet
First published 2014
Jeff Sharlet curates a collection of American writers wrestling with the sacred and unseen across two centuries of national life. The anthology opens with Walt Whitman offering comfort to Civil War soldiers and closes with Francine Prose witnessing his words resurface at Occupy Wall Street. Between these bookends, voices from Henry David Thoreau to James Baldwin to John Jeremiah Sullivan document their encounters with religion and spirituality. These writers employ the tools of literary journalism, blending factual reporting with the techniques of fiction and poetry to capture experiences that resist easy description. The collection includes both celebrated authors and overlooked voices, each contributing to a distinctly American tradition of documentary prose. Works by Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Ellen Willis, Anne Fadiman, and Garry Wills create a conversation across generations about faith, doubt, and transcendence in American life. Sharlet presents these pieces as individual gems that gain power when read together, forming a chronicle of how writers have approached the challenge of making the invisible visible through words.
Genres: literary-criticism, american, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century, american-history
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: documentary-prose, found-family
Setting: Occupy Wall Street
Period: Civil War, Two Centuries
425 pages · Kindle Edition · Yale University Press