Modern day Hartford, Connecticut
Ocean Vuong decides to showcase a side of Connecticut that is not usually foregrounded. Throughout his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he mentions several locales that may not be familiar to those not from Hartford. The images/places that he chooses to highlight are different from Wallace’s Elizabeth Park, or the stately homes of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe in Nook Farm; they are authentic to the real lived experiences of people from an underrepresented side of Connecticut.
On this page, a couple other contemporary authors from CT are mentioned. However, Vuong’s novel proves different from the works of other authors.
Ocean Vuong’s Connecticut
- Find information on Connecticut tobacco history here
- CTown Supermarket website here
- HUD Housing CT (affordable public housing) website here
- Downtown Hartford YMCA website here
- Connecticut River Conservancy site on pollution and swimming in the Connecticut River found here
Other Contemporary CT Authors:
While Ocean Vuong is concerned with subverting typical aesthetic portrayals of Connecticut, the same cannot be said for all other contemporary CT authors. For example, author Luanna Rice from CT writes scenic, beachy romance novels, one of which got adapted into a Lifetime TV series.
Click here to find a list of contemporary authors from CT. Most are unlike Vuong’s novel in that they either do not concern themselves with Connecticut, or if they do, they are set in places like Yale or the beach.
The Hartford Courant published this article of notable Connecticut books published in 2019. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is mentioned.
Among the Connecticut novels published in 2019, very few are concerned with the underrepresented side of Connecticut. The few that are still differ from Vuong’s portrayal of CT. For example, Old Newgate Road is a novel by Keith Scribner about a poor white family that works in the CT tobacco fields.
“I do give a lot of credit to growing up here,” Vuong says, referring to Glastonbury. “Not in a This town made me kind of way, like Old boy does good, you know? But the ways that it was brutal, and how I survived it.”
-Ocean Vuong in Kat Chow’s Atlantic article titled “Going Home with Ocean Vuong”
When looking at the kinds of images associated with the literary giants of Connecticut, compared to the images that Vuong offers in his portrayal of CT, one cannot help but wonder, “why is there such a stark different in these versions of Connecticut?” Perhaps the answer lies in the people who control the production of knowledge about Connecticut: tourism websites, government sites, and article writers to name a few.
