July 28, 2008
Washington, DC

When I studied Geology in college, one of my favorite terms of the trade was time-contemporaneous. We used it most often to describe two completely separate rock formations that were deposited at the same time. For example, the Navasink Formation in central New Jersey is time-contemporaneous with the Fox Hills Formation in South Dakota, both being deposited roughly 75 million years ago.

Dan Brady, with his hand on the fault above the Fox Hills Formation, Badlands National Park, South Dakota

As The Big Read gears up for fall programming, I had the delightful task of shepherding all our previous guides through the reprinting process. In short, I read all the existing guides about four times each. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when one reads them all so close together, the links and coincidences of The Big Read writers become more pronounced.

So, in the interest of time-contemporaneousness, I developed this graphic.

I could look at this for hours. In fact, I have. It’s fascinating to me to think that authors as different as Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway shared a good deal of time on this earth, or that there was a magical decade in the 1840s that saw Poe writing the first modern detective stories, Longfellow crafting epic narrative poems, Tolstoy publishing his first autobiographical confessions, and Mark Twain gathering boyhood experience to be recounted later as fiction in the best of his books.

Another interesting cluster is in the 1920s, when Harper Lee, Cynthia Ozick, and Ursula K. Le Guin were all born. Perhaps because she hasn’t published since the 1960, Lee seems in no way a contemporary to Ozick or Le Guin, who themselves sit pretty far apart in my mind. Clearly something was in the water in the 1890s, as it saw Zora Neale Hurston, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, and Ernest Hemingway enter the world. And back in the 1930s, well more than half our Big Read authors where kicking around, from Willa Cather to Ernest Gaines!

I hope you find this as entertaining and interesting as I did. Look for more mind-boggling graphs to come.

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