Lesy, Michael. Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy.

Pantheon 1973. 1st edition, 2nd printing. "Wisconsin Death Trip is a 1973 non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin, photographer Charles Van Schaick – mostly taken [1890-1910] in the city of Black River Falls – and local news reports from the same period." (Wikipedia) Wisconsin Death Trip is included in Roth, The Book of 101 Books. Summary:

Wisconsin Death Trip is an influential, unconventional work of historical nonfiction and visual collage by Michael Lesy. Developed from his doctoral thesis, the book subverts romanticized myths of the American dream and late-19th-century rural utopianism. Instead, it uncovers a stark, psychological undercurrent of despair, madness, and tragedy in a single Midwestern community at the turn of the century.

Core Themes and Content

• The Black River Falls Case Study: The book focuses strictly on the small town of Black River Falls and surrounding Jackson County, Wisconsin, primarily detailing the years between 1885 and 1900. During this period, the area was heavily buffeted by the harsh economic fallout of the Panic of 1893, isolation, and brutal winters.

• A Non-Linear Historical Collage: Rather than a traditional chronological narrative, Lesy presents an unmediated "psychic history" using a montage technique. The book juxtaposes:

  • The Van Schaick Photographs: Roughly 140 stark, black-and-white images printed from glass-plate negatives captured by Charles Van Schaick, the local town photographer and Justice of the Peace. These include unsmiling studio portraits, street scenes, and haunting postmortem photography of infants in coffins.

  • Local News Archives: Verbatim, matter-of-fact snippets from the town newspaper, The Badger State Banner. These brief reports dryly catalog a horrific wave of local events: suicides, sudden murders, arson, bank failures, religious delusions, and fatal outbreaks of diphtheria and smallpox.

  • Literary and Asylum Records: Complementary excerpts from regional writers alongside clinical logs from the nearby Mendota State Hospital for the Insane.

• The "American Nightmare": Lesy exposes the psychological toll of immigration, disease, and financial ruin on mostly German and Norwegian settlers. The book strips away the nostalgic veneer of the American frontier to emphasize themes of paranoia, alienation, alcoholism, eccentric crimes, and widespread mental collapse.

• The Uncaptioned Presentation: The layout intentionally omits standard text captions or labels for the photographs, leaving the faces of the community members completely anonymous. This design choice forces readers to draw their own haunting associations between the grim visual portraits and the adjacent textual reports of catastrophe.

A massive success upon its release, Wisconsin Death Trip quickly earned its status as a counterculture cult classic, radically shifting how historians approach American archival photography and the hidden traumas of the nation’s past.

Michael Lesy (born 1945) is a distinguished American author, social historian, and academic renowned for pioneering an innovative, cinematic style of narrative nonfiction that fuses archival photography with historical texts. Raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Lesy earned a B.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in American cultural history from Rutgers University. He exploded into the literary consciousness with his first book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), which challenged traditional historical narratives by exposing the psychological decay of late 19th-century rural America. Over a career spanning five decades, Lesy authored more than a dozen acclaimed works of cultural history and biography—including Real Life (1976), The Forbidden Zone (1987), and Murder City (2007)—frequently extracting hidden human truths from overlooked public records and photographic repositories. A devoted educator, he served as a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College for thirty years before being named professor emeritus. Lesy’s unique contributions to American letters have been widely recognized with honors such as a United States Artists Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography Studies.

Copies available:

• Fine, wraps, 1st edition, 2nd printing, with custom-made polyester protector. 
• Near fine, hardcover, 1st edition, 2nd printing, purple cloth, without dust jacket. A few creases in bottom corners of pages.