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MEMOIR / LITERATURE & CRITICISM / ARCHITECTURE & LANDSCAPE
“House Hold
has the makings of an American classic: a perceptive and
deeply affecting book about belonging to a place and yet never quite
belonging.”
—Alice Kaplan, Yale University
Like the house built by Ann Peters’s father on a hill in eastern Wisconsin,
House
Hold
offers many views: cornfields and glacial lakes, fast food parking lots and
rural highways, Manhattan apartments and Brooklyn brownstones. Peters revisits
the modern split-level where she grew up in Wisconsin, remembering her archi-
tect father. Against the background of this formative space, she charts her roam-
ing story through two decades of New York City apartments, before traveling to
a cabin in the mountains of Colorado and finally purchasing an old farmhouse in
upstate New York.
More than a memoir of remembered landscapes,
House Hold
is also an expan-
sive contemplation of America, a meditation on place and property, and an explo-
ration of how literature shapes our thinking about the places we live. A gifted
prose stylist, Peters seamlessly combines her love of buildings with her love of
books. She wanders through the rooms of her past but also through what Henry
James called “the house of fiction,” interweaving personal narrative with musings
on James, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Paule Marshall, William Max-
well, and others. Peters reflects on the romance of pastoral retreat, the hazards of
nostalgia, America’s history of expansion and land ownership, and the conflicted
desires to put down roots and to hit the road. Throughout
House Hold,
she asks
how places make us who we are.
Ann Peters
is assistant professor of English at Stern
College, Yeshiva University, and the recipient of the
2012 McGinnis Ritchie Award for Nonfiction. She lives
in Brooklyn and in upstate New York.
JANUARY
LC: 2013011470 PS
272 PP. 5 ½ × 8 ¼ 14 B/W PHOTOS
E-BOOK $15.95 T ISBN 978-0-299-29623-0
“Here is an autobiography told
through buildings and books, and
the characters that inhabit both
are vividly rendered and entirely
memorable.”
—Christopher Bakken,
author of
Honey, Olives, Octopus
Of re l at ed int e re s t
Sylvia Bell White and Jody LePage
“A fascinating biography, adding important
insight into the African American experi-
ence in Wisconsin as well as the broader
histories of migration, race, and employ-
ment in the twentieth-century United
States.”—William P. Jones, author of
The
Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American
Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South
PUBLISHED JUNE 2013
LC: 2012032691 F 304 PP. 6 × 9
18 B/W ILLUS.
E-BOOK $19.95 T ISBN 978-0-299-29433-5
Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
Peter Ross
