O My America! - 9780374534783

In O My America!, the travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler embarks on a journey across the United States, guided by the adventures of six women who reinvented themselves as they chased the frontier west.
Wheeler’s career has propelled her from pole to pole, but as she stared down the uncharted territory of middle age, she found herself in need of a guide. “Fifty is a tough age,” she writes. “Role models are scarce for women contemplating a second act.” Scarce, that is, until she stumbled upon Fanny Trollope.
In 1827, Fanny, mother of Anthony, swapped England for Ohio, where failure hounded her for years before she wrote the sensational travel account Domestic Manners of the Americans. She was forty-nine when she set out for America, and she led Wheeler to other trailblazers: the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, the radical sociologist Harriet Martineau, the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, the traveler Isabella Bird, and the novelist Catherine Hubback.
Wheeler tracks her bright and spirited subjects from the Mississippi to the cinder cones of the Mayacamas. “I had more fun writing this book than all my previous books put together,” she claims—and it shows. Ambitious and full of life, O My America! is not only a great writer’s reckoning with a young country but also an exuberant tribute to fresh starts, second acts, and six unstoppable women.