The locomotive and the tree: industrial Pittsburgh's late nineteenth-century literary culture

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In The Locomotive and the Tree, I challenge the popular myth that the city of Pittsburgh was devoid of literary culture prior to the construction of the Carnegie museum, library, and concert hall in 1895. Pittsburgh, in fact, had a robust and thriving culture in general and specifically a literary scene that was rooted in newspaper production and was invested in the industrial aspects of the city�s growth. Much of the literary material coming from Pittsburgh was nonfiction or poetry, and it was in these forms that writers in Pittsburgh were able to come to terms with the changes taking place in a rapidly industrializing city. In contrast to scholarship that has emphasized the role of regional literature in this time period, my project uses periodical and print culture studies to analyze the localized literary culture of Pittsburgh. Instead of looking broadly at national literary culture that was disseminated from the East Coast outward, I argue for the need for research that broadens the scope of late-nineteenth century American literature by examining smaller networks of print.