New York State has had its share of writers who have, at some point in their careers, taken New York as their subject. The writings compiled here by Carl Carmer, a native of New York State and one of its finest folklorists, celebrate what he calls the undefined gleanings of this great state, spanning four centuries and six regions of its upstate region.
Carmer writes in his foreword: I have long held that York State is a country, that its people have specific characteristics that make it distinctive. Tavern Lamps gives us 98 British and American authors (with a biographical listing of the authorship in the back of the book) and over 150 selections celebrating the ruch culture and heritage of the state. In the collection, we read Rudyard Kipling on Buffalo's grain elevators, Edith Wharton in the Hudson River Country, Theodore Dreiser on Owego, Herman Melville on the Erie Canal, Henry James on Saratoga, Washington Irving on Knickerbocker, Samuel L. Clemens, De Witt cLinton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many more. This collection, complemented by 40 paintings from the collection of the New York State Historical Association gives us upstate New York from a myriad of its inhabitants and visitors, a multi-faceted portrait of an area about which Carmer hopes the peppered reader will be convinced that there is an over-all one of a kind nonesuchness that separates upstate from the rest of the world.