Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky's home town of
Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets
in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America's most
admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point
of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the
American imagination. Thousands of Broadways explores the dreams and
nightmares of such small towns--their welcoming yet suffocating, warm
yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth
century through World War II.
The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively
and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal
minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain,
William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and
Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his
own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect
knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of
modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be
small minded--in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively
provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative
talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured
or thwarted their artistic impulses.
Of living in a small town, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that the
sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of
the dead, but of living people. Passionate, lyrical, and intensely
moving, Thousands of Broadways is a rich exploration of this crucial
theme in American literature by one of its most distinguished figures.
