LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco
Leland & Crystal Payton
ISBN: 978-0-9673925-9-2
352 pages 7.5×10 511 color illustrations
$35.00 retail
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“Your great grandmother probably teared up when told the story of an Indian princess jumping to her death over a disappointment in love, but Mark Twain laughed,” observed Crystal Payton, co-author with husband Leland of a new book Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco,” April, 2020. The couple believes the godfather of American realism was right about excessive sentimentality. “Twain satirized romantic popular culture, but he was not an elitist snob,” added Leland. “He found these Lover’s Leap fables fake but funny.”
Lovers leap worldwide. Stories about these tragedies extend back to a myth that the ancient Greek poet, Sappho of Lesbos, jumped from a cliff when spurned by her lover, Phaon. In America the leaping was usually done by a love-shattered Indian woman. There are hundreds of dramatic cliffs where a “dusky maiden” is said to have plunged to her death after her father, the chief, objected to her boyfriend from an enemy tribe. Thousands of poems, stories, and newspaper accounts chronicle these dolorous events. Millions of postcards and souvenirs have been manufactured picturing the often-spectacular bluffs where “many moons ago” these tragedies took place. Folklorists have largely ignored these legends. Understandably so—they are “fakelore” and do not resemble Indian traditions.
This 352-page book with more than five hundred color illustrations is the first comprehensive study of Lover’s Leaps. Twain found these saccharine sagas perversely amusing, and so will contemporary readers. Corny cultural products have not vanished however, as the Paytons acknowledge in the book’s dedication: “For Mark Twain—Who diagnosed American’s sentimental romantic infection. Alas, his injection of realism was not a cure.”
“Lover’s Leap Legends is the definitive visual sourcebook for an American tradition that is as disturbing as it is amusing.” –Jared Farmer, author of On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape.
“An inherently fascinating, beautifully illustrated, impressively informative, expertly organized and presented study, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, is an extraordinary, unique, and unreservedly recommended addition to personal reading lists, as well as community and academic library collections.”—Midwest Book Review.
Lens & Pen Press’s new book, LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS, won a bronze medal in the competitive Popular Culture category of the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Awards.
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