Making Up America: Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter

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Bruce Olds, Charles S. Peirce, D.H. Lawrence, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, E.M. Forster, Gary Wills, Grover Cleveland, Harold Evans, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, John Brown, Oswald Garrison Villard, Owen Wister, Robert Coover, Robert Heinlein, Russell Banks, Steve Erickson, Steven Millhouser, William Gibson, William James

This was one of those I wrote for no reason other than that I loved Russell Banks’s novel, Cloudsplitter (1998) so much. I think I did try sending it out once, though without any great expectation, and I briefly considered including it in my first collection of essays, but in truth the only place this ever appeared previously was in an apa. It’s an essay that grows out of my interest in the American Civil War, so there’s no science fiction here, but there is philosophy, which suggests a sort of continuity.