Reading about Indiana

As it's missing, here are a couple of suggestions ...

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter.

Job Hopper and Dirty Sugar Cookies by Ayun Halliday are collections of essays, many of which are about her life growing up in Indianapolis.

In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories by Jean Shepherd are worth mentioning as well. They are short story collections about childhood in northwest Indiana during the great depression.

As for non-fiction, I highly recommend A Lynching in the Heartland by James H. Madison. It's about two young African-American men who were lynched in Marion, IN in 1930.

Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge, Jr. is the first book I think of when I think of indiana books,even though it is fiction and there is no Raintree County in Indiana. My review of it: 4213 Raintree County...which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange, by Ross Lockridge, Jr. (read 25 Sep 2006) When this book came out in January 1948 to tremendous hype, it caught my attention. The author killed himself in March 1948, but I noted the book was still on our public library's shelf so I thought I would read it before it gets weeded. It is 1066 pages, sometimes pretentious, sometimes boring, seemingly 200 or 300 pages longer than necessary, but impressive nonetheless. Johnny Shawnessy, born in 1839, grows up in mythical Raintree County, Indiana, goes to college for two years with professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles, a most unlikeable fellow who is prominent all thru the book. A la Ulysses, the book deals with one day--July 4, 1892--in Shawnessy's life, and the story is told in flashbacks. The story has considerable interest, though the Thomas Wolfe-like exhortations (not nearly as impressive as I found Wolfe's when I read Look Homeward, Angel back in June 1948) clutter up many pages. There is stuff in the book I disapprove of, including Stiles' rants against religion, but one cannot but find the grandeur of the concept for the book rather powerful. I am glad I read it and it will live in my memory long.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is a wonderful book for Indiana. It's fiction, but he talks about dozzens of real places throughout the state.

332. As I Knew Them Memoirs of James E. Watson (read 23 May 1947)

I presume all Indianans know Watson was a Senator from Indiana

Indiana is my home state, so I've put together a list of some great ones...

http://avidreader25.blogspot.com/2012/04/reading-states-indiana.html