Matthew Davis's "A Biography of a Mountain"

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale, and the first English-language children’s book published in Mongolia, The Magic Horse Fiddle. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book dives into the politics of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and begins to explore how his politics impacted his art. A representative sentence from this page is: “Borglum’s own politics were antiestablishment and championed the individual against overarching systems, beliefs he extended towards his art.”

In this sense, page 99 is both representative of the book as a whole while also limiting the book’s aperture. It is representative in that the relationship between politics and art is crucial to the meaning of Mount Rushmore—how Gutzon Borglum’s politics influenced his ideas behind the memorial, and how today’s politics influences its contemporary meaning is an important element of A Biography of a Mountain. But it is limiting in that what I hope to accomplish with this book is expand the story of Mount Rushmore beyond the actual sculpture itself. It is why the work of art is decentralized on the cover in favor a broad picture of the mountain of Rushmore, and why so much time is spent reporting from the present-day Black Hills. The actual sculpture is essential to any book about Rushmore, as is Gutzon Borglum. But what I hope to do in my book is tell a fuller picture of how the memorial came to exist in the Black Hills, how it represents the complicated conversations we are having today about the narratives of American history, and how it reflects the processes by which we memorialize those narratives. In this sense, page 99 limits that perspective.

Visit Matthew Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue