Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century

Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski's book, A Clearing In The Distance, isn't just a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted's life.  It is also a portrait of American life throughout the 19th century.

      Olmsted, widely hailed as the man who established landscape architecture as a profession, was a visionary who realized the need for national parks and designed the first large suburban community in the United States.  However, Olmsted did not discover landscape architecture until he was 35 leaving his youth open to traveling and a great deal of soul searching. He tried his hand at many things, among them, seamanship, farming, and journalism.
      Witold Rybczynski approaches this intriguing 19^th century life with awe and excitement.  In the midst of factual accounts, he often plays with personal asides, comparing Olmsted's experiences with his own and speculating about Olmsted's thoughts and motivations.  Occasionally, Rybyczynski provides dramatic narratives printed in italic type.  The juxtaposition of factual reporting with fictionalized passages allows the reader to explore Olmsted's life on many levels.  Rybczynski's book provides an enthralling story for serious designers and historians as well as those simply looking for a compelling read.

The 480 page text includes black and white photos, landscape plans, a selected list of projects by the Olmsted firm, bibliographic notes, and an index.

O Pioneers!

Willa Cather

      Willa Cather, born in Virginia in 1873, moved with her family from the thickly settled east coast to Nebraska at the age of ten, where homesteads and farms were beginning to rise against the wild, windswept bareness of the prairies.  In 1884, Cather got her first sense of small-town Nebraska life when her family moved to Red Cloud, the settlement, which would appear in O Pioneers! as Hanover.

      Divided into five parts, O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century.  The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland when her father passes, and devotes her life to making the farm a workable enterprise at a time when most immigrant families were giving up and leaving the prairie.

     O Pioneers! grows out of Cather's experiences during her formative years, along with her familiarity with the communities of settlers, her conversations with the immigrant farmers from Sweden, France, and Bohemia, and the primitive power of the prairie itself.  In an interview several years after O Pioneers! was published, Cather described the process of writing the book as one filled with complete joy.

"I decided not to 'write' at all, - simply to give myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and places I'd forgotten."

Each year we solicit suggestions from our attendees, past and future, as to what books they might like to read prior to next February's Arts & Crafts Conference. We then select two and assign each a time and a place at the Arts & Crafts Conference for those of you who have read either of the books to meet, discuss your ideas and share your opinions (those we always have plenty of!).

Our moderator for several years has been Pat Bartinique, a professor of English, an Arts & Crafts collector, an author and a twenty-two year attendee at the Grove Park Inn. Pat reads each of the suggested works, then narrows the list down for us based on her experience both as a reader and as a teacher.