A sense of place is best exemplified by passages in which figurative and literal sites are revealed, in geographic, visual and social contexts. This article offers some cases in point.

Words sweep across the pages of American literature, bringing into view sights and sounds and images.

For those outside the United States, who can only imagine what visual splendors lie behind the undulating syllables "Florida" or "South Carolina" or the staccato rhythms of "Texas" or "Massachusetts," American writers can be wondrous escorts. As authors delineate the places they know, from the pristine past of memory or perhaps from their everyday glimpses of a harsher present reality, they reveal, more intimately and more profoundly than travel guidebooks, the individual tiles of "place" which, when taken together, form a mosaic of the United States.

Readers might be transported across an ocean to the big city -- such as the teeming streets of New York -- and find enchantment there. In World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow turns a sanitation company's water wagon from a utility truck cleaning streets into a vehicular sorcerer, and the stream it leaves in its path becomes a newfound urban waterway:

The street was black and shining. In the raging course of water flowing swiftly along the curb I tossed [an] ... ice cream stick. Other children had appeared and dropped in their sticks and twigs. We followed our boats back down the block as they turned and twisted in the current, followed them down the gentle incline of Eastburn Avenue to their doom, a waterfall pouring into the sewer grate at the corner of 173rd Street.

...where the light in early winter seems to roll off the backs of the clouds and ignite along the waters of ponds and millstreams, and the cold rot smell of the barren forests comes ghostly out of the tough earth, and the gold air and sky have a muted volume of both space and spirit broken only by the reach of church spires, soft-white and giant against the slow maple hills.

I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders. As a boy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark. I knew every shrimper by name, and they knew me and sounded their horns when they passed me fishing in the river.

We came to the Two Medicine River in sunny mid-afternoon and were met by gusts of west wind that shimmered the strong new green of the cottonwood and aspen groves into the lighter tint of the leaves, bottom sides, so that tree after tree seemed to be trying to turn itself inside out. In the moving air as we and the sheep went down the high bluff, a crow lifted off straight up and lofted backwards, letting the gale loop him upward. I called to Varick my theory that maybe wind and not water had bored this colossal open tunnel the Two Medicine flowed through. And then we bedded the sheep, under the tall trees beside the river.

Midway between the Carolinas and Montana, the nation's endlessly flat midsection reveals itself in Jane Smiley's description of a family's vast spread, in A Thousand Acres:

A mile to the east, you could see three silos that marked the northeastern corner, and if you raked your gaze from the silos to the house and barn, then back again, you would take in the immensity of the piece of land my father owned, six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth.

Writing in and about the southwestern United States, Rudolfo Anaya brings the landscape of his native New Mexico into precise focus promptly in the opening paragraph of Bless Me, Ultima:

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood. She took my hand, and the silent, magic powers she possessed made beauty from the raw, sun-baked llano, the green river valley, and the blue bowl which was the white sun's home. My bare feet felt the throbbing earth and my body trembled with excitement. Time stood still, and it shared with me all that had been, and all that was to come....

Each writer has one's own take on "place." For many, including Richard Russo, who concentrates on the small towns of the U.S. Northeast, place is denoted by society. In Russo's case, the world he has known is in decline. He wistfully conveys this turn of events again and again in his books, as in this passage from The Risk Pool, set in mythical Mohawk, New York:

Summer had flown. Fourth of July. Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter... Indeed, a great deal of territory had been surrendered since our ancestors had stolen the land and erected white churches with felled trees. Up and down the Mohawk valley the green world had gone brown and gray, and the people who lived beneath the smokestacks and in the shadows of the tanneries were scared that even the brown and gray might not last. They didn't know what came after brown and gray, and neither did I. One thing was for sure. Each Mohawk Fair was sadder and grayer than the last. And winter followed. With a capital W.

This sociological treatment of place finds its way as well into the writings of Ward Just, a foreign correspondent turned novelist whose trenchant tales of Washington life penetrate the emotions that pervade the nation's capital. In Nicholson At Large, he blends Baedeker with commentary as he observes:

He swept past the Washington Monument and into Rock Creek Park, the Jefferson Memorial to his left; the last time he'd seen Mr. Jefferson, cobwebs hung from his marble nose. In Washington, the monuments did not change. Landmarks were where they always were. The people changed but the buildings remained the same. He thought that in some ways the buildings and what they represented were more important than the people, they were manifestations of continuity. To those who lived in Washington they were apparitions from a submerged past and therefore an affirmation.

Similarly, John Berendt strikes at the heart of Savannah, Georgia, in his enduring nonfiction bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. He observes that although the city had enchanted him, he also had come to understand the principal reason for its "self-imposed estrangement from the outside world," the fact that it was determined "to preserve a way of life it believed to be under siege from all sides." He writes:

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.

Ultimately, though, most writers who concentrate on a sense of place view their surroundings from a visual perspective. Thus, to Anne Rivers Siddons, who normally limns the southeastern section of the nation in her fiction, Palm Springs, California, emerges in her novel Fault Lines as

...a great swathe of green, a dense emerald prayer rug, flung down in all the tawny, wild-animal colors of the desert... Palms, jacarandas, hibiscus, lantana and a great many other exotic flora for which I had no name yet, formed bowers and islands in the almost continuous velvet carpet that...was a network of golf courses without parallel in the United States.

Even so, even when the focus is on description, a drop of fantasy invariably dapples the paragraph. The title village in Volcano, Hawaiian-born writer Garrett Hongo's memoir of childhood,

...is a big chunk of the sublime I'd been born to -- the craters and ancient firepit and huge black seas of hardened lava, the rain forest lush with all varieties of ferns, orchids, exotic gingers and wild lilies, the constant rain and sun-showers all dazzled me, exalted me... There was something magical about it -- a purgatorial mount in the middle of the southern ocean -- and there was something of it native to me, an insinuation of secret and violent origins and an aboriginal past.

And, composing her thoughts from the hushed beauty and solitude of an island in the north central United States, between Canada and the state of Minnesota, Linda Hogan, a Native American poet and novelist reflects in Solar Storms on what it means when one is situated within "the hands of nature":

In these places things turned about and were other than what they seemed. In silence, I pulled through the water and saw how a river appeared through rolling fog and emptied into the lake. One day, a full-tailed fox moved inside the shadows of trees, then stepped into a cloud. New senses came to me. I was equal to the animals, hearing as they heard, moving as they moved, seeing as they saw.

Finally, the gifted writer can bring it all together -- nature, place, society -- with the wisp of nostalgia that always accompanies memory. Barbara Kingsolver reveals this in the title essay from her collection, High Tide in Tucson. Musing about the impact of having transplanted herself from rural Kentucky to the heat of Tucson, Arizona, she reveals that she still hears the "secret tides" of the creek back home "as I force tomatoes to grow in the drought-stricken hardpan of my strange backyard

...yet I never cease to long in my bones for what I left behind. I open my eyes on every new day expecting that a creek will run through my backyard under broad-leafed maples, and that my mother will be whistling in the kitchen. Behind the howl of coyotes, I'm listening for meadowlarks.

In a larger sense, aren't we all?