A place that's known

by Pearson, Michael

Michael Pearson is a seeker of places, and his avenue to them is his own imagination. His quests, intense and introspective, take him to real terrains. At the terminus he always finds the universal. In this, his second book of literary odyssey, he looks to places for a way to understand his heritage. In Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America he wrote about his search to match fictional sites with the images that his reading of them had instilled in his mind. As Pearson explores, it is memory, imagination, and the rejuvenating power of literature that are his unfailing resources. His narrative journey in A Place That's Known probes the indelible locales from his past - the Bronx, where he spent his Catholic boyhood, the placid shores of Long Lake in Maine during his adolescence, and Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, where he spent a troubled time in his young manhood. He follows paths opened in the present by contemporary writers. In the Pine Barrens of New Jersey he meets John McPh