Review by Mack Hassler
“Therefore it was called Babel because there the Lord
confused the language of all.”
Genesis 11:9
A good scholarly writer is needed, especially when there are multiple voices on a topic. Willa Brown began working on Gentlemen of the Woods for her dissertation at the University of Virginia in 2007. Then it was a short paper. She had two women as her advisors, both fine researchers and thanks them very explicitly in her “Acknowledgements” at the end of what now has become a beautiful collection of graphics (photos of posters, actual loggers posing on top of huge pulp logs, and photos of early magazine covers) as well as analyses of her own refined over the years of thinking. For example, Brown’s thinking by this mid-twenties moment in our crazy century contains implications of anti-immigrant politics so common now in 2025 as she describes trends from a hundred years ago of the logger becoming an image for “the tramp riding the rails” due to his “nomadic” movements to locate uncut forests. Even his original masculinity evolves into advertising phrases such as “Meet the Lumbersexual” — “Part Hipster, Part Metrosexual, All Sartorial Man” covered with body images. p. 158.
Her analysis has to do not only with modern colonialism, or our wrestling with “the nomadic immigrant,” (and with transgender sexuality) but also with capitalism itself. As early as 1877, Brown shows her reader the cover of Scribner’s Monthly with an article on “The Wooden Age” and continues:
This insistence on authenticity was by necessity part of a binary. There can be no deep longing for the authentic without a conviction that the reality around us, the world in which we live every day, is somehow inauthentic. The scrambling search for reality was a result of the growing sense that lives in modern cities were disturbing and unreal…. Cities were jumbled and crowded, technology was growing apace…. And the growth of modern capitalism was beginning [even then] to give birth to the outward-focused man, a man who put on a face of respectability for the crowd, but whose real personality could not be known. P 171.
I think this is fine analysis in its text as well. Brown’s book should be read closely, along with her good scholarly documentation in the notes, and not just looked at for the fine images that we associate with the North Woods.
But I love the book too since it represents and shows the U.P. so well—actually a bit to the West. See the graphics from p.159 on for about twenty pages concluding with this caption written by Brown, “In the late 1940s, three thousand square miles of the Brainard lakes region in central Minnesota were rebranded as Paul Bunyan Vacationland with pictorial maps and brochures.” This graphic comes right after a poster for a film in 1955 called “TimberJack” starring Sterling Hayden that Brown comments on, “The film poster directly links his rugged masculinity to the ‘untamed’ wilderness.”
University of Minnesota Press does make lavish and beautiful books. They blurb books well too. On the back cover they write,” Anchored in the dual forces of capitalism and colonization this lively and compulsively readable account offers a new way to understand a myth and history that have long captured our collective imagination.” They chose a very fine cultural historian, also, to do the analysis for them in Willa Hammitt Brown. The result is both Good Art and thoughtful analysis about what many of us want to become “Gentlemen of the Woods.”
Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack, by Willa Hammitt Brown (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2025, 344 pages, 110 b & w photos, 16 color plates and 2 maps, $29.95 jacketed cloth.
