Cities on a Hill - by Frances Fitzgerald (Paperback)

About the Book

In the mainstream and on the fringe, Cities on a Hill is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frances FitzGerald's marvelous and witty exploration of four communities remaking the American Dream. A lucid work of literary imagination and journalistic precision.

Book Synopsis

"We must consider that we shall be A City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us," John Winthrop told his Pilgrim community crossing the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Four centuries later, Americans are still building Cities Upon a Hill.
In Cities on a Hill Pulitzer Prize-winner Frances FitzGerald explores this often eccentric, sometimes prophetic inclination in America. With characteristic wit and insight she examines four radically different communities -- a fundamentalist church, a guru-inspired commune, a Sunbelt retirement city, and a gay activist community -- all embodying this visionary drive to shake the past and build anew.
Frances FitzGerald here gives eloquent voice and definition to a quintessentially American impulse. It is a resonant work of literary imagination and journalistic precision.

Review Quotes

Publishers Weekly Brilliantly succeeds in getting inside the minds of these communities.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review An eloquent testament to the crazy vigor of this country, a book that persuades us that it's still the luckiest place to be whatever your stripe...An ambitious work...painstakingly thorough.

The New York Times Ms. FitzGerald [has] the watchful eye of an anthropologist...writing with lucid sympathy for her subjects...A well-written, well-documented book.

The Washington Post Absorbing...extremely thought-provoking, and great fun to read...I could hardly turn the pages fast enough.

About the Author

Frances FitzGerald won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize for History, the National Book Award, and the National Institute for Arts and Letters Award, among others, for her monumental Fire in the Lake. She is the author of America Revised and Way Out There in the Blue, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.