'The Pittsburgh Novel' catalogs Western Pennsylvania fiction back to the late 1700s

Dec. 15—As a young man in the early 1960s, Peter Oresick stopped at his local library and borrowed a copy of "Request for Sherwood Anderson," a story collection by fellow Ford City native Frank Brookhouser.

In the book, he recognized settings and surnames from his hometown — and that was the start of a long journey that will culminate with the publication of "The Pittsburgh Novel," an annotated bibliography of all known fiction with a significant geographical setting in Pennsylvania's 26 westernmost counties.

Set to launch in mid-January by Penn State University Libraries through its Open Publishing program, the searchable bibliography organizes content using keywords, genres and place settings with abstracts and editor's note for each entry.

Peter Oresick started adding entries to the bibliography in the 1970s. He died in 2016, and "The Pittsburgh Novel" was ultimately completed by his son Jake Oresick, 40, an attorney in the North Hills.

"This was my father's brainchild and passion," Oresick said. "There is a ton of historical fiction — dozens of works involve the Battle of Fort Necessity, the Battle of the Monongahela or the Johnstown Flood in 1889."

From an overzealous football fan who chokes a rival fan to death with a Terrible Towel ("On Any Given Sunday," 1982, by Ben Elisco) to a man involved in the Pittsburgh steel strikes of the 1890s ("The Man Who Lived Backward," 1950, by Malcolm Ross), more than 1,500 works are included in "The Pittsburgh Novel," with writers as diverse as Stephen King, August Wilson, Willa Cather, Michael Chabon and Kurt Vonnegut.

"Our topography and landmarks can further a plot in ways that other regions can't," Oresick said. "We've also got all four seasons, which gives authors more range and flexibility. Ultimately, though, a lot of authors write what they know, and many of them have Western Pennsylvania ties."

The database goes back to 1792, where the oldest known entry is "Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O'Regan, His Servant," written by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who would go on to found the institutions that would eventually become the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Oresick's father was a literature scholar, publisher, professor and poet. He said he couldn't be happier to help shepherd his father's final project over the finish line.

"This bibliography will support regional scholarship, as academics can now identify and analyze works using multiple subcategories with unprecedented precision, and professors can easily find regional works for their reading lists," Jake Oresick writes in the introduction. "However, 'The Pittsburgh Novel' is also for library science professionals, book clubs, teachers, students, parents looking for a bedtime story, teenagers looking for a movie to stream and proud western Pennsylvanians from all 26 counties."

The searchable bibliography organizes content using keywords, genres and place settings and includes the abstracts and notes by the editor for each entry. Places are nested in each entry by county, municipality, neighborhood, sub-neighborhood and landmark, according to locations in the title.

A unique feature of the bibliography is the interactive map that accompanies it. The map consists of two layers of zones. One is the Pittsburgh neighborhood layer, which outlines all neighborhoods within Pittsburgh as regions or zones. An additional layer outlines all other municipalities in the western half of Pennsylvania. Clicking on a region in the map provides a list of titles associated with that region or zone with links to that title in the bibliography.

When it is launched in mid-to-late-January 2023, it will be available at OpenPublishing.PSU.edu.

Patrick Varine is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Patrick by email at pvarine@triblive.com or via Twitter .