Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. After coming across a long-lost copy of her great-grandmother’s 1947 cooking and entertainment guide, At Home On the Range, she teamed up with McSweeneys to produce a new edition of the book.
From Gilbert's Q & A with Marc Schultz at Publishers Weekly:
How much did you know about this book before re-discovering your old copy?Read about Elizabeth Gilbert's best books.
I knew about it peripherally my whole life. My mother did exactly the right thing: she gave it to me on my wedding day, of my first marriage, when I was 24 and irresponsible and just callow enough to put it in a box and ignore it. And I didn’t find that book again until last spring—I’m now 43. I’m embarrassed to say I dismissed it, “I’m sure there’s a lot of Jell-o and meatloaf in there.” I didn’t think it would be the literary and culinary feast that it turned out to be.
How did you go about getting it re-published?
It was a case of perfect timing—just a couple weeks earlier, Dave Eggers had approached me to ask if I wanted to put together an anthology for ScholarMatch, a collection of short stories I like, and I could write a foreword. Then I found this book! And I sent him an e-mail about it, I have something so much better than reading about why I like Chekov so much—I have this treasure.
And it’s like this weird case of stewardship, to bring this woman’s voice to a time in history when people would appreciate it. She was ahead of her time in 1947, writing about artisanal food and epicurean adventures when the country was...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
