List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Prologue
Part I Dismal Harmony
1 The Office of Letters and the Bomb: Brookside and Old Rimrock
2 Fourth of July Parade
3 Indigenous American Berserk
4 Fig Leaf: The Voice of the Pastoral
5 Walled Garden
Part II Babel
6 All Babel Breaks Loose
7 Inside the Territory: Myth and History
8 Harmony: Bill Orcutt’s WASP History Tour
9 Dissonance: Bucky Robinson’s Jewish History Tour
10 Counterfactual: Beatrice and George Jenkins Sr.’s Black History Tour of Morristown
11 On the Dead-End Dirt Road: The Quiet Babel of Stoney Hill Road and Where Goodbye Newark Meets Goodbye Orchard
12 Brookside Bards: Steven Cramer’s Poetry of Protest and Christopher Merrill’s Poetry of Place
Part III Pentecost Remembered and Lost
13 Brookside against the Current
14 NIMBY: Protecting Green Space with Green Money
15 The Price of Harmony
16 The Table of Otherhood and Communion
17 The Community Club and Its Dissidents
18 American Pastoral and Revolutions of the Word
Epilogue: “The Great New Jersey Novel”: American Pastoral and the Garden State of Letters
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index