| Garden writing is more than a literary genre of personal essay that, as New Yorker editor and garden columnist Katharine White wrote in 1970, might "give pleasure to all readers, gardeners and non-gardeners alike." It is an array of literary practices that have combined cultural and environmental commitments across genres. Moreover, writing about gardens in America has always been political work. For far too long, literary critics (including ecocritics) have overlooked garden writing as a serious literary practice with important political consequences.;"Writing Gardens and Cultivating Lives" examines a broad archive of American garden writing in the twentieth century: essayists like Elizabeth Lawrence, Katharine White, Alice Walker, Helen and Scott Nearing, Michael Pollan, and Jamaica Kincaid; stories, ethnographies, and reportage on community gardens; and satires of gardening in the novels of Jonathan Franzen and Jerzy Kosinski. Writing gardens has become an ethical practice that joins social and environmental concerns across the sweep of suburban, urban, and rural landscapes in which both private and public gardens have inspired diverse literary modes for cultivating lives in twentieth-century America. |
