Award-winning author Frederick Turner examines the lives and careers of nine American authors, the locales they made famous, and the ways in which landscape played a role in the creation of their finest works. Spirit of Place is both a testament to the creative genius of nine of America's most important writers and an insightful investigation of the vital role of the physical landscape in the cultural development of the United States.

Frederick Turner has written essays on topics as various as Indians, exploration, the American west, jazz, Paris, and food and wine for publications such as American Heritage, Smithsonian, The Nation, Wilderness, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The International Herald Tribune, Blair and Ketchum's Country Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Southern Review, Men's Journal, Tin House, and Outside.  
 
He received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976 and the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1981. His other books include: Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness; Remembering Song: Encounters with the New Orleans Jazz  Tradition; Of Chiles, Cacti, and Fighting Cocks: Notes on the American West; 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age; In the Land of Temple Caves: Notes on Art and the Human Spirit; and The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years

• Contents 
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ONE 
• How Divine These Studies: The Challenge of the Unsung Land
• TWO 
• Nearer Here: Henry David Thoreau's Walden and The Maine Woods
• THREE 
• A Pilot's Memory: Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn
• FOUR 
• Community of Sin: George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days and The Grandissimes
• FIVE 
• The Bishop's Face: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
• SIX 
• Plainsong: Mari Sandoz's Old Jules
• SEVEN 
• Place Spirits: William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and “The Bear”
• EIGHT 
• The Valley of the World: John Steinbeck's East of Eden
• NINE 
• Of Local Interest: William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain and Paterson
• TEN 
• Voice Out of the Land: Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX