Throughout western Pennsylvania, novels, screenplays and short stories articulate a vision of the region. The documentation of these works is what writer and teacher Peter Oresick, and his son Jake, completed in “The Pittsburgh Novel: Western Pennsylvania in Fiction and Drama, 1792-2022.”
The bibliography notes more than 1,500 works of fiction in its recent publication under Penn State University Libraries. The site shows each fictional work’s location on an interactive map, and each neighborhood or municipality has a red pin that can be clicked on to display a list of connected works. Neighborhoods like Oakland have 282 fiction works mentioning the area (“The Bend of the World,” “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”) and municipalities like Monroeville have 32 (“Dawn of the Dead,” “A Man Called Otto”).
“Authors, I feel that they write what they know and they write what is special to them. And a lot of authors in the Pittsburgh novel had a western Pennsylvania connection, and that's why they wrote about it,” Jake Oresick said.
The project began in the late 1970s when Peter Oresick found that his students were more responsive in class to Pittsburgh-related fiction works. He began a running list in collaboration with former Carnegie Mellon University professor David Demarest, and eventually turned it into a blog.
In 2016, Peter passed away. Jake Oresick, a practicing attorney and author himself, decided to try to finish the project. He went through his father’s list of nearly 1,000 titles, creating annotations for each work. Jake found various lesser-known works that were unique and exciting, one of which was the 1930 film “Hot Curves.”
“A fictitious baseball team called the Pittsburgh Cougars signs the Jewish soda vendor who works at Forbes Field as a catcher, as a way to market the game to more Jewish fans and boost attendance,” he said. “But that soda vendor ends up becoming a really good player and helping lead the team to the World Series. And I thought, that's really novel.”
After more than six years, the work was completed and published on Jan. 31. That same day was proclaimed by the Pittsburgh City Council as “Peter Oresick Day.”
The University of Pittsburgh will be hosting a book launch with Jake Oresick on Mar. 7 at the Hillman Library.
