The Jewish daily newspaper, Forward, recently featured an article about American folklorist B.A. Botkin. Botkin’s legacy is the subject of the new OU Press book America’s Folklorist: B.A. Botkin and American Culture, edited by Lawrence Rodgers and Jerrold Hirsch.
Botkin was born in Massachusetts in 1901 to a family of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Harvard in 1920 and went on to teach the first courses in contemporary poetry at the University of Oklahoma. He later became the president of the Oklahoma Poetry Society and Oklahoma Folklore Society.
Through his work with the Federal Writers’ Project during the New Deal, the Writers’ Unit of the Library of Congress Project, and the Archive of American Folksong, Botkin did more to collect and disseminate the nation’s folk-cultural heritage than any other individual in the twentieth century.
Forward contributor Benjamin Ivry writes,
Botkin … sought the widest possible range of material in compiling a society’s folklore, including books and popular culture — a practice opposed to the narrow methodology of professors who felt that only orally transmitted tales and songs from rural areas were genuine folklore. These other scholars were, as Brooklyn-born folklorist Bruce Jackson notes, “looking for texts that could be properly annotated and indexed; [Botkin] was trying to document the soul of a land.
Click here to read the full article.
America’s Folklorist is the first book to reevaluate the legacy of Botkin in the history of American culture. The book brings together reflections that range from the historical to the philosophical to the disarmingly personal. One group of articles looks at his career and includes the first extended analysis of Botkin’s poetry; another probes the fruitful relationships Botkin had with leading musicologists, composers, poets, and intellectuals of his day. This is also the first book to bring together a collection of Botkin’s best-known writings, giving readers an opportunity to appreciate his wide-ranging mind and clear, often memorable prose.
Lawrence Rodgers, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Oregon State University, Corvallis, is author of Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel.
Jerrold Hirsch is Professor of History at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, and author of Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project.
