When the music critic Greil Marcus set out to make sense of rock and roll in the early 1970s, he tried something that seems more intuitive now than it did then: He looked to American literature as a backdrop for what he was hearing from the likes of the Band and Sly Stone. Putting literature and popular culture together, Mr. Marcus said at the time, came naturally to him. As he put it in the introduction to "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music": "I am no more capable of mulling over Elvis without thinking about Herman Melville than I am of reading Jonathan Edwards . . . without putting on Robert Johnson's records as background music."
For Mr. Marcus the echo of the Puritan preacher's vision of hell in the blues guitarist's bargain with the devil offered proof that rock music wasn't simply an American subculture; it was American culture itself. The music, he argued, was connected to the very past that its rebellious spirit sought to break from. Indeed, rock's countercultural ethos would shape the future that some rockers hoped they wouldn't get old enough to see. What a rock song had to say and the way it said it, according to Mr. Marcus, was both literature and history. He made the point so forcefully in "Mystery Train" and the books that followed—on Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley, among others—that he helped change American attitudes toward popular culture even as he transformed himself from rock critic to cultural critic.
Nearly 35 years after "Mystery Train," "A New Literary History of America" reads like a monument to the insight that sparked Mr. Marcus's reading of rock and roll. In this thousand-page compendium—edited by Mr. Marcus with Harvard literature professor Werner Sollors—it's clear that nothing remains of the boundaries that traditionally separated literature, history and popular culture.
The book comprises more than 200 essays on American life. Some of the contributors are best known as scholars—their fields include American studies, philosophy and architecture—others are novelists, poets and artists. The essays, on topics arranged in chronological order from the 16th century to the present, play off one another like a series of riffs on the theme that Messrs. Marcus and Sollors lay down in their introduction: "This is the story of a made-up nation" with a "literature that was not inherited but invented."
If there is a version of Puritanism that underwrites the book's vision of American culture, it owes as much to a forgotten figure like Edward Taylor as to the Jonathan Edwards sermons that Mr. Marcus once heard haunting Robert Johnson's songs. A physician and minister in 17th-century Massachusetts, Taylor wrote poems that were dramas of inquiry, asking how things fit together and what their relations meant. Where Edwards prodded his congregation with a terrifying vision of the afterlife, Taylor looked for patterns and meaning in day-to-day ordinariness. Mr. Sollors's entry on Taylor calls him a "tinkerer, risk taker, language explorer, multilingual punster, lover of metaphors, and coiner of strange images."
In snapshots of a few thousand words each, the entries in "A New Literary History" put on display the exploring, tinkering and risk-taking that have contributed to the invention of America. Many of them capture formative literary moments: the poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) seeing the landscape of Massachusetts for the first time; Hawthorne and Melville talking shop in a cave after a storm interrupted their Berkshire trek; Ralph Ellison hearing a barroom story about a black man who could make himself invisible; the New York poet Frank O'Hara taking a job selling tickets at the Museum of Modern Art.
But nearly as many of the essays are about formative moments in a culture that you wouldn't usually think of as literary. Some of these episodes are as central to American history as Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address or Martin Luther King's stint in a Birmingham jail. But others are less obvious cultural waypoints: Alexander Graham Bell and his brother agreeing to communicate with each other after death; Henry Ford meeting the politically radical painter Diego Rivera; Bill W. joining an alcoholic proctologist and convening what amounted to the first AA meeting.
Tracing a particular topic through the book means moving not just through time but across perspectives. One possible swing through American music, for example, would encounter historian Sean Wilentz on shape-note singing, poet Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg's "American Songbag" and the art critic Dave Hickey on the lessons that songwriters learned from Hank Williams.
Some of the most captivating essays seem to transcribe snippets of their authors' continuing obsessions. When Sarah Vowell writes on Grant Wood's "American Gothic"—the famous portrait of a stoic Midwestern farm couple with a pitchfork between them—she first strips away the pop-culture veneer that the painting has accumulated, from TV's "Green Acres" to the picture of Paul Newman and his daughter on the label of their line of organic snacks. This is just the kind of American kitsch that Ms. Vowell relishes. She then reveals an image of the country's uncertainty about its own values. "What we see here is self-doubt," Ms. Vowell writes. "All the starch in Iowa cannot stiffen the look on that woman's face. Her sidelong glance betrays something more interesting than pain—ambivalence. Mixed feelings about her lot in life is the most modern feeling a woman can have."
A New Literary History of America
Edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
Harvard, 1,095 pages, $49.95
Whether it's the former New Yorker magazine editor Robert Gottlieb explaining how a particular brand of American talk lit a fire in movies of the 1930s ("romance by wisecrack—love American style"), or Walter Mosley sorting out what it means to be hardboiled ("from gangsta rap to the Patriot Act, America is a hardboiled nation"), you get the feeling that the authors would be telling somebody the same story even if the book didn't exist.
A few contributors seize on their assignment as a chance to wrestle with an influential predecessor. In what may be the book's most surprising entry, Mary Gaitskill scrambles to comprehend the unexpected sympathy she felt for Norman Mailer when, having imagined she would dislike him, she wound up watching him spar with Gore Vidal on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1971. "To her surprise, she was surprised," Ms. Gaitskill writes, using the third-person voice that Mailer himself fell into so naturally in "The Armies of the Night." Mailer, it turned out, struck her as vulnerable and perhaps even gentle beneath the circus-bear posturing of his public persona. "The only other person who had aroused such feelings in her before was Lyndon Johnson, whose ugly, profound, helplessly emotional face had made her feel like crying for reasons she could not understand."
Other essays catch younger writers in a similar act of finding their place in American literature. Novelist David Treuer, for instance, traces a looping path from a song about fireflies in the Ojibwe country where he grew up, in America's upper Midwest, through Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" to Nabokov and Hemingway.
I don't imagine that anyone will read each of the essays with equal pleasure or that any two readers would agree on their favorites. The biggest risk in this kind of writing is the temptation to herd more history into the everything's-connected corral than is feasible in the scope of a few pages. Journalist and memoirist Ann Marlow's essay links the porn movie "Deep Throat" and the memoirs of its star, Linda Lovelace, to the Watergate hearings (their tone, not just the codename of the affair's key informant), the blandness of politicians, the smugness of op-ed writers, "Catch-22," Mad magazine, the early reality show "An American Family," the persistent idea that the moon landings were a hoax, and the ascendancy of the "memoir of abuse." Each connection may seem plausible, but the effect of coming across them one after another in a brief essay is like looking in on a series of parties you wish you had time to crash.
Some readers may register a similar complaint about the book as a whole, but at a vast scale the superabundance of ideas and voices fits more comfortably. "A New Literary History of America" gives us what amounts to a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear. What you see isn't the past so much as the present.
Flashing back to the essay that opens the book makes the point. In retrospect, Toby Lester's dramatic account of the discovery of "America" reads like a synopsis of what Messrs. Marcus and Sollors have achieved in their new literary history. In Mr. Lester's view, it was impossible to understand the achievement of the explorers who discovered the unknown territory across the Atlantic until a pair of cartographers put two and two together while preparing a new edition of Ptolemy's "Geography."
The huge map they created as a result became, in a sense, the first American text: "On the map's left side, rising out of the formerly uncharted waters of the Atlantic and stretching almost from the map's top to its bottom, . . . was a strange new continent, long and thin and mostly blank. And there, in the general vicinity of what is known today as Brazil, a strange new name appeared: America."
The point is that it's less the landscape of fact that matters than the way we understand and talk about what's really there. The story Messrs. Marcus and Sollors have to tell in "A New Literary History of America" isn't itself new. The line of cultural tinkerers the book describes have been inventing this same America for centuries. But the editors have drawn a new map for us and inscribed it boldly with the strange name America.
—Mr. Davis is editor of an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry to be published by Harvard University Press.