An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk is an anthology of writings by persons without literary ambition that were developed in the first nine years of Free River writing workshops. Published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, the collection contains prose and poetry of the homeless, short essays and stories by Midwestern and Mississippi Delta farm families, by small town residents of vanishing rural America, and by men who make their living on the Mississippi River: a towboat captain, a river pilot, a commercial fisherman.
Inspired by America Today, Thomas Hart Benton’s 1932 panorama of the United States, An American Mosaic explores America from the point of those whose stories are seldom heard. The editor, Robert Wolf, connects these panels with interpretive essays on contemporary America.
As a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Wolf hears America singing by recording poems and essays by the homeless, farmers, commune inhabitants, and residents of small river towns, the most common and least represented element in our urban, urbane culture. What weaves these pieces together is a sense of sadness and nostalgia because a way of life is disappearing. Wolf sees the rapid technological advances of the past few decades as increasingly dehumanizing. Jettisoned in its wake, he theorizes, are the thousands of mentally ill homeless, the newly unemployed and impoverished, the low-tech and depressed small-town dwellers, and the abandoned company ghosts of the manufacturing era. Local education has failed in the misery belt ‘because those driving this society are, as a class, anti-intellectual and unimaginative.' These elegiac themes dominate."
Famous quotes containing the words american, prose, poetry, everyday and/or folk:
“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce great poetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Indeed, the best books have a use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the preface, not concluded in the appendix. Even Virgil’s poetry serves a very different use to me today from what it did to his contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental value merely, proving that man is still man in the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““... You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The ties between gentle folk are as pure as water; the links between scoundrels are as thick as honey.”
—Chinese proverb.