We're all familiar with the ancient Mayan civilization whose traces can be found across the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America, but do you know how those amazing ruins were discovered? In Jungle of Stone, William Carlsen takes us on a journey with the team that originally fought through the jungle to uncover the lost civilization, a tale which Kirkus calls in a starred review “Thrilling. …A captivating history of two men who dramatically changed their contemporaries’ view of the past.” You can uncover this untold story when Jungle of Stone hits shelves April 26, but today the author has stopped by LLF to "uncover" his love for libraries!
***
Just out of the army in the late 1960s, I entered the University of California, Berkeley, on the G.I. Bill. I knew I would still have to work myself through school (I majored in of all things Rhetoric—very practical). My first choice in the university’s “work-study” program was a job in one of the university’s many libraries. While in the army I had spent most of my free time in post libraries, always with my head in a book. Now, I found myself working as a library page in the university’s Bancroft Library, a research repository for western history collections. While there I was asked to retrieve handwritten correspondence from Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain, two authors I revered, and to my disbelief I held in my hands many of their letters as I brought them up from the stacks to researchers.
I was hooked. My dream was to write, and here early on I had discovered one of the great treasures of libraries, not only as cherished places of books but also the often hidden resources behind those books. I went on to a career in journalism at the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times; and the need for libraries (oddly newspaper libraries are called “morgues”) and the power of research was never lost on me, particularly during my many years as an investigative reporter.
Decades after my first encounter with the Bancroft Library, I found myself there once again. My wife and I lived for many years part time in Guatemala, where I had fallen in love with a nineteenth-century writer named John L. Stephens. I had traveled to several of the astonishing stone ruins of the ancient Maya scattered in the jungles of Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. But I became ever more enthralled with that civilization through the eyes of Stephens, who in the 1840s published riveting books about his adventures with an artist named Frederick Catherwood and their discovery of the lost civilization of the Maya. I decided to follow their 2,500-mile journey through the jungle in my beat-up 1985 Toyota Corolla, a car without air conditioning or radio and the closest thing I could find to the mules the two men had used during their expeditions. On returning to my home in San Francisco, I discovered to my surprise that Stephens’s letters and personal papers were located across the Bay at the Bancroft Library. There, spellbound by his personal writings and letters that revealed his deep friendship with Catherwood, who had so brilliantly illustrated their travels of exploration and adventure together, I began my own journey that resulted in Jungle of Stone, a work aimed at telling not only the story of their extraordinary lives but the discoveries they made that changed the world’s understanding of the history of the Americas before Columbus.
All the best,
Bill
***
Thanks Bill! Look for Jungle of Stone on shelves April 26 to discover the unknown story of explorers who changed history.
-Amanda