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Wisconsin Death Trip (Paperback)

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4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
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  • This item: Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The last decade of the 19th century was, for some Americans, a time when great fortunes were to be made. For many others, however, the period was a time of economic dislocation, when the gap between city and countryside, rich and poor, grew ever wider. As the Indian Wars ended and the Gilded Age extended into America's first Imperial Age, social critics such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells began to examine the dark side of the American dream: violence, poverty, degenerate behavior, suicide, and insanity.

In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siècle America. Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. First published in 1973, Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, now reissued in a handsome paperbound edition, became a key text of the counterculture, a book to shelve alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins--and it sometimes reads like a hip product of its time. Lesy documents the unsettling record of one small corner of rural America, turning up accounts of barn burnings, attacks by gangs of armed tramps, threatening and obscene letters, death by diphtheria and smallpox (the Wisconsin townsfolk had, some years, to attend several funerals a week), alcoholism, madness, business and bank failures, and even a case or two of witchcraft.

After reading Lesy's texts and viewing the sometimes unsettling images he's turned up, you would be forgiven for thinking that no one in small-town Wisconsin in our great-great-grandparents' time was well-adjusted--which is, of course, not the case. Hyperbole notwithstanding, this is a remarkable study, one that Lesy himself rightly calls an experiment in both history and alchemy. --Gregory McNamee



From Library Journal

As the title suggests, this is a truly strange book. Published in 1973, it is essentially a collection of photos taken in Black River Falls, WI, by Charles Van Schaik between 1890 and 1910. The subject matter ranges from children in coffins, to farm animals, to family portraits of some of the grimmest-looking people imaginable; the photos are accompanied by snippets from newspapers. The whole package seems to confirm that the good old days were actually awful.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 261 pages
  • Publisher: University of New Mexico Press (January 1, 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0826321933
  • ISBN-13: 978-0826321930
  • Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.4 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,169 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #1 in  Books > History > United States > State & Local > Midwest
    #3 in  Books > History > United States > State & Local > Wisconsin
    #15 in  Books > Arts & Photography > Museums & Collections > Museums > Exhibition Catalogs

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More About the Author

Michael Lesy
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Wisconsin Death Trip
87% buy the item featured on this page:
Wisconsin Death Trip 4.7 out of 5 stars (32)
$23.07
The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life
5% buy
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$11.16
A Reliable Wife
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A Reliable Wife 3.3 out of 5 stars (193)
$16.29
Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties
2% buy
Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties 4.6 out of 5 stars (9)
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Customer Reviews

32 Reviews
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4.7 out of 5 stars (32 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A HARROWING PORTRAIT, May 30, 2001
The first of Michael Lesy's books, 'Wisconsin death trip' is as harrowing and breathtaking today as when it was first published, back in the early 1970s. Utilizing a veritable treasure-trove of miraculously preserved glass negative plates taken in rural Wisconsin during the period of the 1880s-early 20th Century, and combining them with newspaper clippings and other snippets of local news from the area and era, Lesy has pieced together an amazing (if bleak) view of life in that day and age. Times were hard, and the challenges faced were many and daunting -- anyone bemoaning the state of life in America today should read this book...anyone who wants a truer sense of American history should read this book. You will never forget it.

On a related note, readers might be interested to know that this book inspired Stewart O'Nan's great novel 'A prayer for the dying' (also available through amazon.com).

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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing, April 26, 2005
By Peter F. Martyn (Brattleboro, VT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
In the spring of 2000, I was sitting in the admissions office at Hampshire College, waiting to be interviewed. With some time to kill, I browsed a bookshelf featuring the works of Hampshire professors. One of these books was Wisconsin Death Trip. It caught my attention thanks to the Static-X album of the same name (of which I was a big fan at the time...no longer, though), so I pulled it from the shelf to find that haunting cover photo staring at me with its dark, blurry eyes. It drew me in, in a way that was far from comfortable. It left me no choice. I had to see what was inside.
As it turned out, I had a long wait for my interview, and I made it through most of the book. If it had been anything other than a sunny spring afternoon, I doubt the interview would have gone well at all. Suicide and murder, madness and despair, babies in coffins and grim stone-faced Lutherans. The images were haunting, and those conjured up by the simple matter-of-fact accounts even more so. This book haunted me.

Fast forward a year and a half, and I'm a first-year student at Hampshire. I walk into the bookstore and what do I see but Wisconsin Death Trip. I'm short on cash, but I buy it. I haven't really got a choice. Just about everyone who comes into my room gets to look at it. Fortunately, this is Hampshire College, so that probably helps my social life a bit.

Four years later, the Death Trip still holds a prominent place on my shelf. Every so often I take it out and open it, and inevitably I end up reading it cover to cover. This book is powerful, haunting, and above all else important. Uncomfortable as it may be, this is American history. This is a tale of the price we pay for progress. These are the souls who were caught in the gears of the machine.

In my time at Hampshire I had Mr. Lesy as a teacher. Towards the end of the semester, I asked him why he felt compelled to write this book. He told me that after looking through the images and articles used herein, that he realized that he was looking at "an American Holocaust." And that, he felt, was something that people needed to know about. I wholeheartedly agree.

Pick up this book and you will not put it down.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars My Favorite Book, December 2, 2006
By The Comtesse DeSpair (http://asylumeclectica.com) - See all my reviews
"The pictures you're about to see are of people who were once actually alive." So begins historian Michael Lesy's masterpiece - a by turns touching and disturbing examination of life and death in a small Wisconsin town during the final 15 years of the nineteenth century. Lesy stumbled across a cache of 30,000 glass plate images made by a local town photographer named Charley Van Schaick and spools of microfilm from the local newspaper - and combined the most compelling of these images and newspaper excerpts to create a vivid examination of Victorian prairie life. Although there are numerous post-mortem memorial photographs to add morbid appeal to the book, the newspaper and insane asylum excerpts are what I find absolutely enthralling. If ever anyone tries to suggest to you that times were better "before", you might want to refer them to these matter-of-fact tales of murder, suicide, insanity, and lethal pestilence. Death was a constant threat and entire families of 6 children could be wiped out by diptheria in a matter of days. It's no wonder that so many were driven to suicide: the depth of despair that these people must have gone through is at times palpable.

To give you an idea of the sort of macabre fascinations you can find in these olde newspapers, here are some excerpts:
"The 60 year old wife of a farmer in Jackson, Washington County, killed herself by cutting her throat with a sheep shears"
"Mrs. James Baty... died suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs. She leaves a husband, her family of 6 children having died of diptheria last summer"
"Mrs. John Larson... drowned her 3 children in Lake St. Croix during a fit of insanity... Mrs. Larson imagines that devils pursue her"
And my personal favorite:
"Mrs. Carter... was taken sick at the marsh last week and fell down, sustaining internal injuries which have dethroned her reason. She has been removed to her home here and a few nights since arose from her bed and ran through the woods... A night or two after she was found trying to strangle herself with a towel... It is hoped the trouble is only temporary and that she may soon recover her mind"
You don't see entries like that in newspapers anymore!!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars a VERY one-sided--and thus limited--review
This is a true story.

When I was around 11 years old (I'm 46 now), we got this book as a Christmas present from my quiet uncle, who was a doctor far away. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Erica Bell

2.0 out of 5 stars This book could be anywhere...
You can read through all the reviews here to get an idea of what the book is about, but the things which occur in this book did not all happen in just in one county as other... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Janlynn

5.0 out of 5 stars haunting, humorous, genuine
I recently read "The Time-Traveler's Wife" and noticed a small reference to a book I hadn't heard of -- "Wisconsin Death Trip. Read more
Published 7 months ago by SarahCM

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving, effective, original, singular
Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, originally a doctoral thesis, is one of the most touching, poetic, beautiful, harrowing, moving and dislocating works I have read. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Konrad Baumeister

5.0 out of 5 stars Wisconsin Death Trip
Buying a classic again. This is the U of New Mexico Press version. The earlier publisher had the picture of the baby in a coffin on the cover. Read more
Published on November 22, 2007 by stumblingblock

5.0 out of 5 stars Accurate,but not singular
"Wisconsin death trip"is an accurate documentation,not only of "agrarian white"culture at the end of the 19th century but,in many ways,the whole of white culture in america at... Read more
Published on June 14, 2007 by Charles H. Levenson

5.0 out of 5 stars Wisconsin Death Trio
This is an interesting and slightly macabre book which is strangely beautiful. My son, who is Sam Witt, the poet, told me about it because he had been so moved by it that he... Read more
Published on January 18, 2007 by Sally C. Witt

5.0 out of 5 stars American Gothic Death Rattle
I read this book over 16 years ago. It left a lasting impression that will stay with me forever. It may not have the same affect on others but reading some of the reviews posted... Read more
Published on December 14, 2006 by J. Thomas

2.0 out of 5 stars Old Photographs and Newspaper Clippings
Michael Lesy combined his work as a photographer and a historian to produce this book as his Ph.D. thesis at Rutgers University in 1973. Read more
Published on September 24, 2005 by Acute Observer

5.0 out of 5 stars Very emotional, gripping, extraordinary book
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard (a newspaper clipping about two drunk guys who thought they were magicians) or felt so very sad (another clipping of a four-year-old girl... Read more
Published on June 24, 2005 by WisconsinGal

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