Harrison’s poetry abounds with images from northern Michigan. Not so his fiction, most of which is set in places he has traveled to rather than the place he lives. Harrison is a place-oriented writer who can and does write accurately about many places. He disdains regionalism. “A writer’s just a writer,” he says, bumping along a gravel road in his Landcruiser, “and anytime a writer gets buried in regionalism or ethnic background he’s making a mistake. He has to stay free of all entanglements like that.”

Take a real time and place, and a real type of people, let the imagination go to work on them, and create your own complex, enduring myths. Myths not just of Albany, but America itself in microcosm. It’s an approach that demands a gut-thorough understanding of the history of one’s place, and Kennedy is fortunate to have had his seep in like it did.

“Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint,” Algren wrote in City on the Make, “you have to love it a little while.” Liebling clearly thought otherwise. From the get-go, his look at Chicago was down his nose. 

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