This superb period work, the honeymoon project of a remarkable LIFE Magazine photographer/journalist couple (10 months, 30,000 miles, thousands of photos), constitutes "a chronicle of American Writers from 1607 to 1952." Rather than shooting a "sentimental array of personal relics," the authors opted for a "pioneering use of photographs to interpret literature," capturing the "nature, mood and quality of the writing" of 93 seminal American literary men and women by photographing America as they had seen her.

Hence, the subjects vary as widely as do the writers' niches within the "recurring spirit of revolt and reform" that is found to emerge. There are landscapes, such as Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow, Willa Cather's Nebraska plains, Robinson Jeffer's Pacific seacoast; urban domains such as Ben Franklin's cobblestone Philadelphia, Dos Passos' Gotham skyline, Ring Lardner's tropical Grand Hotel, and Sandburg's Chicago stockyards; small town vignettes including New England farmsteads, Midwest general stores, and various country inns, mills, and "great houses"; and such psychic interpolations as John Steinbeck's long road, Sinclair Lewis' hypocritical Main Street, and all too many authors' derelicts, shanties and ruins.

Regardless of subject, the compositions evince an expert eye and sympathetic heart. Even Thoreau's cliched pond is freshly interpreted as a dawn study in receding shadow and rising mist. The shots taken from Emily Dickinson's bedroom windows, or along a deeply embanked stretch of Mississippi's legendary Natchez Trace highroad, are alone worth the price of admission.

Production values are high in this 50's era Dodd Mead, BOTM Club Dividend publication: heavy, glossy paper only slightly browning with age does justice to the full tonal range of the superbly composed images. Many of the shots (Wolfe's Asheville; Twain's Virginia City) have themselves become historically significant records of a "today" long since replaced by much more of considerably less. The "concise biographical material" on the writers whose worlds the 179 photos depict are designed to "place [them] in the unfolding literary scene" beginning with Captain John Smith over 300 years beforehand, and continuing through 1952 with mention of the "promising" newcomer, Eudora Welty. The mostly black dust jacket ties it all together with a mythic aerial shot of a 19th century steamboat "headed south, below Memphis" on a gloriously golden-hued stretch of Mark Twain's beloved Old Muddy.

Many of these writers are no longer considered major, if they ever were. No matter - they fill out an American panorama, and their stories and the hauntingly atmospheric images that interpret them are worth returning to again and again, for something that goes a bit beyond mere nostalgia, I think; or if not, then as broadly American a nostalgia as we can realistically hope for, at least through a survey of our literary heritage.