Wisconsin Death Trip

"Protestants behaving strangely in the 1890s . . . an outbreak of craziness—multiple murders, suicides, ghost sightings, epidemics, guntoting teenagers, schoolmarms hooked on cocaine and general mental illness (well, an insane asylum was nearby)—all in a little town called Black River Falls, populated mostly by German and Scandinavian immigrants."

"In Van Schaick's time, ordinary people did not have cameras, difficult contraptions that involved black powder and heavy glass plates; to record the passages of a life--births, marriages, store openings, funerals--so they turned to a professional. Lesy noticed Van Schaicks's many pictures of dead infants and children, dressed in their christening gowns, now placed in tiny coffins. As he looked for the story behind these photos, he found a story of plagues: of murder, suicide, farm and business failures, madness, addiction, tramp armies, and the ruin of childhood and the desolation of families by epidemics of diptheria, typhoid, smallpox, and flu. Lesy made a montage, using items from the local paper, contemporaneous regional fiction and poetry, asylum records and the photographs left by Van Schaick, who in Lesy's pages emerges as Arbus's unknown ancestor."

"Lesy's reading of rural decay is history with a wrench, unfolding a scenario worthy of Dreiser, Faulkner, or Joyce Carol Oates at their grimmest."

"Compelling both as history and as literature, it is a small masterpiece of the historian's art."

"[This] is an impressive example of the poetry of history. . . . There can be no question that this original work makes us deeply feel one form that misery has taken; and in causing us to feel, as well as consider, Wisconsin Death Trip has enlarged on the uses of history."

"Wisconsin Death Trip has become a cult favorite, an example of hybrid nonfiction narrative about more than an era and its people in Black River Falls. Lesy created a story of the seen and unseen, the spoken and the silent in small-town America at the end of the nineteenth century. . . . In that space between knowing and not knowing, Wisconsin Death Trip becomes mesmerizing."