Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures

"We must consider that we shall be A City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us," John Winthrop told his Pilgrim community crossing the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Four centuries later, Americans are still building Cities Upon a Hill.

In Cities on a Hill Pulitzer Prize-winner Frances FitzGerald explores this often eccentric, sometimes prophetic inclination in America. With characteristic wit and insight she examines four radically different communities -- a fundamentalist church, a guru-inspired commune, a Sunbelt retirement city, and a gay activist community -- all embodying this visionary drive to shake the past and build anew.

Frances FitzGerald here gives eloquent voice and definition to a quintessentially American impulse. It is a resonant work of literary imagination and journalistic precision.

Frances FitzGerald won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize for History, the National Book Award, and the National Institute for Arts and Letters Award, among others, for her monumental Fire in the Lake. She is the author of America Revised and Way Out There in the Blue, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.