blueprints

94 | robert hass
the mid-Victorian era, when Longfellow published “Hiawatha”; or earlier
in Regency England when Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote Lyrical Ballads
and Lord Byron was the fashion all over Europe (though at the time, about
1 percent of English males had any higher education and only about 40
percent of males and 20 percent of females could read at all). Drs. Cole and
Boorstin had held a number of scholarly symposia on the history of American
literacy, and I went to the Center to borrow the studies that were published
afterward.
What I saw when I got in the door of this bright set of rooms in the labyrinth
of the Madison Building’s sixth floor was a cheerful space full of
bookcases (containing the books I was looking for, published by the Library’s
publishing arm) and some desks and lots of posters—fresh posters that were
advertisements for the Center’s various Young Readers programs and posters
of the kind I remembered from my children’s classrooms: state maps with the
homes or birthplaces of American writers highlighted on them. Here was
Nebraska with its deep snows and deep green fields and summers full of
fireflies and lightning storms coming south across the plains from the Dakotas.
And here was the home territory of Willa Cather, near Red Cloud
where the family settled in 1887, where My Antonia and The Bohemian Girl
and The Song of the Lark had been imagined. And here, near Wayne, was
where John Neihardt grew up, and here was Bancroft where, as a young
man, he came to know the Omaha reservation and its people, which led to
his collaboration with Black Elk on Black Elk Speaks. And here at Mirage
Flats, Mari Sandoz was born in 1896. I had read her Great Plains books as a
child from my parents’ bookshelves—they were Book of the Month Club
subscribers in the 1950s—and Old Jules, her account of her father’s years
homesteading on the prairie (to which I later added Wallace Stegner’s Wolfwillow,
about homesteading in Saskatchewan, for my understanding of that
way of life and those years). And there was Wright Morris, born in Central
City in 1919. Morris had become a San Francisco writer, a writer’s writer
in that city, but the book of his I had most admired was A Ceremony at Lone
Tree, and that was the book sitting in my imagination beside My Antonia
and Old Jules the first time I drove across Nebraska in a green, steamy
August.
The poster—and there were others—was exactly what I had in mind
when I began thinking about environmental stewardship and local literacy.
And it was exactly the kind of artifact that I would have thought old-fashioned
and corny a few years before. I was interested in the avant-garde