Howard Mansfield

Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation.

He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”

Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”

“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”

His most recent book, Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers, is about Americans seeking their Promised Land, their utopia out on the horizon — which by definition, is ever receding before us.

In Chasing Eden we meet a gathering of Americans – the Shakers in the twilight of their utopia; the Wampanoags confronting the Pilgrims; the God-besotted landscape painters who taught Americans that in wilderness was Eden; and 40,000 Africans newly freed from slavery granted 40 acres and a mule – only to be swiftly dispossessed. These and other seekers were on the road to find out, all united by their longing to find in America “a revolution of the spirit.”

His forthcoming book, I Will Tell No War Stories, is a little different for Mansfield.

Shortly before his father died, he was cleaning out the old family home when he found a small, folded set of pages that had sat in a drawer for 65 years. It was a short journal of the bombing missions he had flown. He had no idea he’d kept this record. Airmen were forbidden to keep diaries.

He quickly read through it, drank it down in a gulp. Some of the missions he flew were harrowing, marked by attacking fighters, anti-aircraft cannon blowing holes in his plane, and wounding crewmen. They had limped back to England flying on three of the four engines with another engine threatening to quit. He’d seen bombers blown out of the sky, exploding into nothing – ten men, eighteen tons of aluminum with tons more of high explosives and fuel: Just gone. And they had to fly on.

His father, like most men of his generation, refused to talk about the war.

I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in Mansfield's family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace?

I Will Tell No War Stories is, finally, about learning to live with history, a theme he has explored in some of my earlier books like In the Memory House and The Same Ax, Twice.

Mansfield has contributed to The New York Times, American Heritage, The Washington Post, Historic Preservation, The Threepenny Review, Yankee and other publications.