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I pore over maps for much the same reason that I read and re-read texts. Both satisfy my “rage for order”; both require insight and artifice. Geographers and creative writers seek to organize space and time, the world and our experience in it. Maps—like works of poetry, fiction, and drama—rarely reveal all their meanings after one reading. When I closely read a place’s literature and its maps, those produced at different times by different authors and cartographers, my comprehension of life in that location intensifies, even if it is the location I inhabit. These charts and narratives have not only a resemblance, but, as Franco Moretti asserts, an interrelationship, influencing one another, working together to complicate our understanding of each, revealing the “real issue of literary history”: the interaction between a place, its language, and its forms (5). Authors sometimes provide a map of a work’s setting, even when, as in the case of William Faulkner, the locale is imaginary. Conversely, a work of imaginative literature intensifies our experience of real places and their representations.

              

The lines and shadings in Detroit area maps are especially significant, marking the stark inequalities of American society: Here, one of the nation’s wealthiest counties borders one of its poorest; the city itself is over 80% African American, while most of its surrounding suburbs are over 90%white. For the first fifty years of the twentieth century, Detroit was the engine that propelled American prosperity, the city where generations from all over the world came to fulfill their aspirations. In the next fifty years, it became the visible reminder that things could go very wrong in America. “Detroit’s postwar urban crisis,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, “emerged as the consequence of two of the most important, interrelated, and unresolved problems in American history: that capitalism generates economic inequality and that African Americans have disproportionately borne the impact of that inequality” (5). As Sugrue suggests, in Detroit, the logic of American industrial capitalism played itself out, leaving huge swaths of desolate, empty space where neighborhoods, factories, and businesses once stood. In the aftermath of decades of government-subsidized suburbanization based on maps employing destructively potent red lines, it became clear that racial injustice is not restricted to the American South. In many and contrary ways, Detroit is, as Philip Levine observes, “the exact center of the modern world.”

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As Detroit’s industrial production declined, its artistic production grew. The last seven decades have witnessed unprecedented industrial and corporate disinvestment in Detroit, but at the same time, writers, artists, and musicians have invested the city with language, vision, and sound.  This is the era of Motown, the Broadside Press, the Cass Corridor artists, the Heidelberg Project, and Techno; this is when Robert Hayden, Dudley Randall, Philip Levine, Naomi Long Madgett, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Joseph, and Jeffrey Eugenides, among many others, put Detroit on the literary map.

 

The poets and storytellers who have written about Detroit understand that something important has happened here, and they share an impulse to reveal it. It’s difficult to live in this city, to care about it, without feeling the need to capture the experience, to define it properly, to let the outside world know about what has happened here. The popular images of Detroit are so lacking in appreciation of its complexity, its power, its dramatic physical decay and sometimes startling beauty, that if, as Lawrence Joseph says, “you’ve been here long enough,” you can feel a responsibility to capture the experience, to get it right.  It is a fascinating experience, full of compelling images and powerful stories.  That’s why writers who grew up in and around Detroit continue to write about the city long after they have moved away.

           

A person who attempts Detroit literary cartography has one advantage: Detroit’s writers, perhaps even more than those from other cities, make specific references to the places and times of their works. Titles and texts often include the names of streets, parks, landmarks, and dates: “Belle Isle, 1949;” “Blackbottom;” “Coming Home, Detroit, 1968;” “Detroit River North to South;” “Drum: Leo’s Tool and Die, 1950;” “Elegies for Paradise Valley;” “Elegy for Tiger Stadium;” “Grand Circus Park;” Middlesex; “St. Peter Claver;” “Trumbull Ave;”  “Woodward Avenue;” “M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School;” and “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again.” In a city that has changed so rapidly—where yesterday’s thriving institution becomes today’s vacant lot which becomes tomorrow’s sudden symbol of rebirth—fixing place and time becomes especially purposeful.

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This website identifies and describes places and times that are important in Detroit literature. Contributors include faculty, students, alumni, and friends of the Marygrove College Institute for Detroit Studies and Department of English and Modern Languages. Several contributors have some connection with the specific place under discussion. More sites will be added in the future.

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I express deep gratitude to all the writers who have contributed to this literary map, to Anna Fedor for her wonderful photographs and David Deis of Dreamline Cartography for his cooperation in designing the prototype map in 2003.  I thank the following members of the Marygrove staff, faculty, and administration who have supported this project: Renee Ahee, Jamie Babcock, Katherine Blanchard, Karen Cameron, Pao-yu Chou, Forrest Johnson, Andrew Koper, Shane Sevo, and the late Chae-Pyong Song. I am grateful to these students who served as research assistants:  Cassie Atkinson, Felicia M. Davis, Jacklene Johnson, and Laurie LePain Kopack. For their consistent support of this and other Institute of Detroit Studies projects, I thank Marygrove College Presidents Glenda Price, David Fike, and Elizabeth Burns; Vice Presidents Jane Hammang-Buhl, Kenneth Malecke, and Jacqueline El-Sayed; Deans Judith A. Heinen, Rose DeSloover, and Donald E. Levin; Darcy L. Brandel, Chair of the English and Modern Languages Department; Thomas A. Klug, former director of the Institute for Detroit Studies; and Shaun Nethercott, the executive director of the Center for Detroit Arts and Culture @ Marygrove. I acknowledge with thanks the assistance and support of my longtime faculty colleagues in Marygrove's Department of English and Modern Languages and Institute for Detroit Studies. The 2020 edition was developed with the invaluable assistance of Mary Lou Greene who worked tirelessly on the map's design and appearance. I am especially grateful to Kim Stroud for her partnership and advice.

             

This literary map is sponsored by the Institute for Detroit Studies, which is now a program of the Center for Detroit Arts and Culture @ Marygrove. This project was originally co-sponsored by the Marygrove College Department of English and Modern Languages and made possible with the support of an SBC Ameritech Partnership Award administered by the Michigan Colleges Foundation. Recent support of the Institute for Detroit Studies comes from the Kresge Foundation. 

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Through this Detroit literary map, we hope to emphasize Detroit’s importance to literature and literature’s importance to Detroit, to generate thought and discussion about the connections between the city in space and the city in literature. As Franco Moretti has written, “Placing a literary phenomenon in its specific space—mapping it—is not the conclusion of geographical work; it’s the beginning. After which begins in fact the most challenging part of the whole enterprise: one looks at the map, and thinks” (7). May this map and the literature it describes help us to think in new and purposeful ways about this remarkable American city.

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A Literary Map of Detroit is an ongoing project. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

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Frank D. Rashid, editor                                                                                                      

Professor Emeritus of English, Marygrove College                                                                                                  

Cofounder of the Institute for Detroit Studies

Center for Detroit Arts and Culture @ Marygrove

8425 West Mc Nichols Rd.

Detroit, MI 48221

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Works Cited

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Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1860-1900. Verso, 1998.

Sugrue, Thomas J. Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press, 1996, 2005.

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Revised January, 2020