The Literature Network - Flights of fancy ; Symbol of an era, the tiny hummingbird fired the imaginations of 19th-century writers and artists

Flights of fancy ; Symbol of an era, the tiny hummingbird fired the imaginations of 19th-century writers and artists

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 20080420
Author:Michael Kammen - Michael Kammen teaches American history and culture at Cornell University and is the author of "A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture."

Book Review

A Summer of Hummingbirds:

Love, Art, and Scandal in the

Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain,

Harriet Beecher Stowe,

and Martin Johnson Heade

By Christopher Benfey

Penguin, 287 pp., illustrated, $25.95

Strange as it may seem, during the decades spanning 1862 to 1882 especially, the hummingbird became a notable American icon, particularly among a tangled cluster of New England-based illuminati. As Christopher Benfey observes in "A Summer of Hummingbirds," a highly engaging and deftly written sequence of intertwined vignettes, the tiny, energetic, and brilliantly ...

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Flights of fancy ; Symbol of an era, the tiny hummingbird fired the imaginations of 19th-century writers and artists

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