Franklinstein began as a mash-up of two classic US texts: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. It was an inspired move, to juxtapose the plainspoken, aphoristic words of a founding father with the modernist novel written by a Jewish, lesbian expat who sought to dismantle and redefine concepts of “the new world” and literature itself.
On Susan Landers's 'Franklinstein': queer / neighborhood / preservation
It’s often the closing thoughts of critical works in and around urban history that show the author at their most utopian.