The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati by Lee Davis Willoughby

Americana: The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati
by Lee Davis Willoughby

The Making of America was a series of novels published from (according to LibraryThing) 1979 to 1987; there were an astounding fifty-six of them. They chronicled, as far as I can tell, the settling of the American West, but I don't think they had consistent characters or stories. The first few books are credited to a number of different authors, but beginning with book nine, they're all the work of Lee Davis Willougby... except that Lee Davis Willoughby didn't exist, it was a pseudonym for a variety of authors. LibraryThing lists six different authors known to have written under the name.

Published: 1990
Acquired: December 2022
Read: June 2023

In 1990, there was evidently an attempt to recapture the success of The Making of America with a new series of novels, Americana: The Making of the Cities. Three volumes were released, covering Cincinnati, Omaha, and Baton Rouge. These evidently were less successful, for these three were it, and thirty-three years later, I am the only person on LibraryThing to have logged any of the three novels. I picked up Cincinnati as part of my project to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati.

The novel focalizes the development of Cincinnati from the 1830s to the 1860s through a German immigrant, one of the first to come to Cincinnati. As the descendant of German immigrants myself (though they came over later, in the 1870s), I was particularly interested to read this take on it.

Alas, as you might have guessed of a pseudonymously written work of the type where you might pump out seven books in a year... it's not very good. I think my biggest problem is that despite the title, you don't get much of a sense of the city. Most of the book is given over to the melodrama of its protagonist's life, with the development of the city as a vague background. What is it like to walk around and live in Cincinnati in 1830? 1850? 1860? We only get glimpses. Facts about the history feel crowbarred in to prove the writer did their research; people will say things like, "Cincinnati has more people per square mile than any other city in the Union," or mention that Frances Trollope has visited the city for no real reason, or suddenly start talking about the creation of the Mount Lookout Observatory, and then go back to what they were supposed to be saying. There are a lot of neat aspects of Cincinnati history to be uncovered, but they aren't really integrated into the story.

The story in the foreground is pretty meh. The protagonist is a real piece of work, brutal in business, forceful and exploitative of women, callous toward people of color. Whoever Willoughby was in this case, their writing ability doesn't rise to the level of making this interesting to read about; our glimpses of the protagonist's mind are trite. As the book goes on, more and more of it is given over to this subplot about potential incest involving the protagonist's children. It goes on too long and it's just not very well written.

It's 372 pages long, but I blazed through it in less than two days. Before reading it, I was mildly curious about Omaha, but given the quality of this one, I won't be seeking out any other Lee Davis Willoughby... whoever they were.