Reading Portland: The City in Prose - Paperback

by John Trombold (Editor), Peter Donahue (Editor)

Reading Portland is a literary exploration of the city's past and present. In over eighty selections, Portland is revealed through histories, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, and news reports. This single volume gives voice to women and men; the colonizers and the colonized; white, Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Indian storytellers; and lower, middle, and upper classes.

In his introduction, John Trombold considers the history of writing about a place that has nourished a provocative and errant literary tradition for over 150 years. In the preface, Peter Donahue considers the influence of region--particularly Portland's urbanity and its hybrid population--on literature.

Included here are the voices of Carl Abbott, Kathryn Hall Bogle, Beverly Cleary, Robin Cody, Lawson Fusao Inada, Rudyard Kipling, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joaquin Miller, Sandy Polishuk, Gary Snyder, Kim Stafford, Elizabeth Woody, and many more.

Front Jacket

Ranging from stories told long before Euroamericans arrived in the Pacific Northwest to those published in the twenty-first century, Reading Portland is a literary exploration of the city's past and present. In almost one hundred selections, Portland is revealed through histories, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, and news reports. Authors include Harvey Scott, Abigail Duniway, Stewart Holbrook, Beverly Cleary, Ursula LeGuin, Elizabeth Woody, and many more.

Author Biography

John Trombold teaches at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. Peter Donahue teaches at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama and is the author of many short stories and books, including the novel Madison House. Together, they edited Reading Seattle: The City in Prose.