Family (1994)

Ian Frazier's first book since his best-selling Great Plains, tells the history of his family in America from the early colonial days to the present. Using letters and other family documents, he reconstructs two hundred years of middle-class life, visiting small towns his ancestors lived in, reading books they read, discovering the larger forces of history that affected them. He observes some of them during the British raid on Danbury, Connecticut, in the Revolutionary War; he follows others west as they pioneer in the wilderness of Ohio and Indiana, where schoolteachers were paid in whiskey and front-door hinges were made of bacon rind. He visits the battlefields where they fought the Civil War. Parts of the book detail life in the town of Norwalk, Ohio, a county seat founded by the great-great-great-great-grandfather, as it emerges from backwoods hardscrabble into the prosperity of the Gilded Age. Frazier interviews old-timers, uncles, aunts, cousins, maids, and a beer-store owner who knew his dad. He pursues the family saga in aspect from trivial to grand, hoping for a "meaning that would defeat death." Family is a poetic epic of facts, a chronicle of Protestant culture's rise and fall, a memorial and a revised view of American history as romantic as it is cold-eyed. (0-374-15319-1)