BiblioVault

Yeats's Shakespeare

Rupin W. Desai

Northwestern University Press, 1971

In Yeats's Shakespeare, the first full-length study of Yeats’s interest in Shakespeare, Rupin W. Desai explores how Shakespearean works influenced Yeats’s poetry and mythological drama. Exploring Shakespeare’s sonnets and Yeats’s poetry, Desai illustrates the deep degree to which Yeats identifies with Shakespeare, even to the extent of including some of Shakespeare’s heroes in his own late poetry. Yeats’s Shakespeare also includes an appendix that lists in detail all of Yeats’s references to Shakespeare’s works.

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The Yellow Journalism

The Press and America's Emergence as a World Power

David R. Spencer

Northwestern University Press, 2007

When a case containing dismembered human remains surfaced in New York's East River in June of 1897, the publisher of the New York Journal--a young, devil-may-care millionaire named William Randolph Hearst--decided that his newspaper would "scoop" the city's police department by solving this heinous crime. Pulling out all the stops, Hearst launched more than a journalistic murder investigation; his newspaper's active intervention in the city's daily life, especially its underside, marked the birth of the Yellow Press. In a work that studies the rise and fall of this phenomenon, David R. Spencer documents the fierce competition that characterized yellow journalism, the social realities and trends that contributed to its success (and its ultimate demise), its accomplishments for good or ill, and its long-term legacy.

Most notable among Hearst's competitors was New York City's The World, owned and managed by a European Jewish immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer. The Yellow Journalism describes how these two papers and others exploited the scandal, corruption, and crime among the city's most influential citizens, and its most desperate inhabitants--a policy that made this "journalism of action" remarkably effective, not just as a commercial force, but also as an advocate for the city's poor and defenseless. Spencer shows how many of the innovations first introduced during this period--from investigative reporting to the use of color, entertainment news, and cartoons in papers--have had a lasting effect on journalism; and how media in our day reflects the Yellow Press's influence, but also its threatened irrelevance within the broader realities of contemporary society.

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You Are Here

Paul Breslin

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Acerbic, rueful, tender, and suffused with understated wit, Paul Breslin's first collection of poems inhabits a realm of hard truths: the human condition in extremis, imprisoned or enslaved; the urban nightmare of incipient violence; the universe of adult dementia seen from the perspective of the baffled child.

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You Got Older

A Play

Clare Barron

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Winner of a 2015 Obie Award for Playwriting

Mae has returned home to help her father while he undergoes treatment for cancer. But she needs a little help herself. She’s just lost her boyfriend and her job. (It turns out there are consequences to dating your boss . . .) And she’s desperately craving intimacy of any sort. Mae escapes into the the arms of a chain-smoking, imaginary Cowboy who turns her on and ties her up. And she escapes into chatter with her siblings as they attempt to distract and entertain themselves in a hospital waiting room. But ultimately, it’s her deep love for her father that teaches Mae to remain optimistic and ambitious in the face of suffering and that gets her back on track.

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You May See a Stranger

Stories

Paula Whyman

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Miranda Weber is a hot mess. In Paula Whyman’s debut collection of stories, we find her hoarding duct tape to ward off terrorists, stumbling into a drug run with a crackhead, and—frequently—enduring the bad behavior of men. A drivers’ education class pulsing with racial tension is the unexpected context of her sexual awakening. As she comes of age, and in the three decades that follow, the potential for violence always hovers nearby. She’s haunted by the fate of her disabled sister and—thanks to the crack cocaine epidemic of the ’80s, the wars in the Middle East, and sniper attacks—the threat of crime and terror in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Miranda can be lascivious, sardonic, and maddeningly self-destructive, but, no matter what befalls her, she never loses her sharp wit or powers of observation, which illuminate both her own life and her strange, unsettling times.

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You Need a Schoolhouse

Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South

Stephanie Deutsch

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, first met in 1911 at a Chicago luncheon. By charting the lives of these two men both before and after the meeting, Stephanie Deutsch offers a fascinating glimpse into the partnership that would bring thousands of modern schoolhouses to African American communities in the rural South in the era leading up to the civil rights movement. Trim and vital at just shy of fifty, Rosenwald was the extraordinarily rich chairman of one of the nation’s largest businesses, interested in using his fortune to do good not just in his own Jewish community but also to promote the well-being of African Americans.

Washington, though widely admired, had weathered severe crises both public and private in his fifty-six years. He had dined with President Theodore Roosevelt and drunk tea with Queen Victoria, but he had also been assaulted on a street in New York City. He had suffered personal heartbreak, years of overwork, and the discouraging knowledge that, despite his optimism and considerable success, conditions for African Americans were not improving as he had assumed they would. From within his own community, Washington faced the bitter charge of accommodationism that haunts his legacy to this day. Despite their differences, the two men would work together well and their collaboration would lead to the building of five thousand schoolhouses. By the time segregation ended, the “Rosenwald Schools” that sprang from this unlikely partnership were educating one third of the South’s African American children. These schoolhouses represent a significant step in the ongoing endeavor to bring high quality education to every child in the United States—an ideal that remains to be realized even today.

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Young Lions

How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel

Leah Garrett

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Awards in the American Jewish Studies category
Winner, 2017 AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Modern Jewish History and Culture: Africa, Americas, Asia, and Oceania

Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new “Jewish” war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.

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