Wisconsin Death Trip (Wisconsin)

In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siecle 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 Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's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

Product Description
First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.

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).


Vivid Truth of agrarian White American History   January 21, 2003
L. Dann (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania United States)
23 out of 27 found this review helpful

I read this book frequently during the 70's after leaving Wisconsin where I went to college and lived briefly on a farm. The impact has remained with me throughout my life; the devastating loneliness and alienation and great griefs that actually are so much a part of the 'roots' of white America. The spectre of the end of the timeless native american cultures, without a media to sensationalize or distort, were nevertheless traumatic to watch. Especially to people for whom there were few social holding places- in a world plagued and stark.

The style of the book with entries from the State Assylum intake log, the local newspapers, some journals and the shocking family pictures, and pictures of the dead, constitutes a multiple fact assault that feels nothing less than gothic fiction.
I don't believe it is possible to get a clearer understanding of the European agrarian foundations of America- and the incipient madness that was never far from the essence of that life. My Antonia is like a fairy tale by comparison.


disturbing and informative   July 10, 2002
James Warner (CHICAGO, IL United States)
22 out of 39 found this review helpful

the pictures in this book explain a lot to me,seeing as my family originally came from this part of wisconsin. and many of them were insane.


This Book Inspired "A Prayer for the Dying"   September 16, 1999
19 out of 23 found this review helpful

I am happy that a new edition of this book will be out in April. The recently published novel by Stuart O'Nan, "A Prayer for the Dying," was inspired by "Wisconsin Death Trip." Fans of the latter will absolutely have to check out O'Nan's haunting novel, based in Friendship, Wisconsin shortly after the Civil War. "Prayer" is available at Amazon.com, and getting all sorts of rave reviews. Check it out!


Mesmerizing   April 26, 2005
Peter F. Martyn (Brattleboro, VT)
19 out of 22 found this review helpful

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.