The author begins his “nonlectures” with the warning “I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer.” Then, at intervals, he proceeds to deliver the following:
1. i & my parents
2. i & their son
3. i & selfdiscovery
4. i & you & is
5. i & now & him
6. i & am & santa claus
These talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e. e. cummings. Together, it forms a good introduction to the work of e. e. cummings.
Arriving in the 1990s with a ninth grade education, N. traveled to Chicago where he found access to ESL and GED classes. He eventually attended college and graduate school and became a professional translator.
Despite having a well-paying job, N. was isolated by a lack of legal documentation. Travel concerns made promotions impossible. The simple act of purchasing his girlfriend a beer at a Cubs baseball game caused embarrassment and shame when N. couldn't produce a valid ID. A frustrating contradiction, N. lived in a luxury high-rise condo but couldn't fully live the American dream. He did, however, find solace in the one gift America gave him–-his education. Ultimately, N.'s is the story of the triumph of education over adversity. In Illegal, he debunks the stereotype that undocumented immigrants are freeloaders without access to education or opportunity for advancement. With bravery and honesty, N. details the constraints, deceptions, and humiliations that characterize alien life "amid the shadows."
Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere's most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many as the best black novelist of her generation. In his search for Nella Larsen, the "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding this central figure of modern literary studies, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities.
Author of a landmark study of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson here produces the definitive account of a life long obscured by misinterpretations, fabrications, and omissions. He brings Larsen to life as an often tormented modernist, from the trauma of her childhood to her emergence as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Showing the links between her experiences and her writings, Hutchinson illuminates the singularity of her achievement and shatters previous notions of her position in the modernist landscape. Revealing the suppressions and misunderstandings that accompany the effort to separate black from white, his book addresses the vast consequences for all Americans of color-line culture's fundamental rule: race trumps family.
A stunning history of legendary treasure seekers and enigmatic natives in Mexico's Copper Canyon
The Sierra Madre--no other mountain range in the world possesses such a ring of intrigue. In the Sierra Madre is a groundbreaking and extraordinary memoir that chronicles the astonishing history of one of the most famous, yet unknown, regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the Raramuri/Tarahumara, award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers offers a rare look into the ways of the most resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of Mexican mountaineers, and the fascinating parade of argonauts and accidental travelers that has journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters including Antonin Artaud, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo, and Pancho Villa, Biggers uncovers the remarkable treasures of the Sierra Madre.Originally published to glowing reviews and literary prizes in France in 1985, this revealing diary not only recounts the moving and tragic relationship of its author, Geneviève Bréton, with the rising young nineteenth-century artist Henri Regnault, it also serves as a valuable historical document concerning the social, cultural, and political life of the French Second Empire.
The young Geneviève Bréton began her journal in 1867 as a consolation for the death of her eldest brother, Antoine. She met Regnault soon after on a trip to Rome. Throughout the next four years of their relationship, Bréton eloquently describes the personal, cultural, and political turbulence that affected her life. Writing against the backdrop of France’s fateful conflict with Prussia and the hardships and dangers of the siege of Paris and the Commune, Bréton, with innate candor and lyricism, creates a text that beautifully illuminates French art, literature, family life, society, and politics of the time. Her poignant account of her love for and engagement to Regnault reveals special insight into the life and mind of an extraordinary, though little known, literary talent. At Regnault’s death in 1871 during the Franco–Prussian War, the expression of her anguish is as much testimony to the political and cultural disorder of the time as it is to her own personal tragedy.
Following Bréton’s own instructions that she left before her death in 1918, this English version of the diary reincorporates material that was deleted from the French edition. Graced by rare photographs of the Bréton family as well as Regnault’s paintings, the book contains a touching foreword by the author’s granddaughter, Daphné Doublet-Vaudoyer. In its first English translation, it is a book for lovers of French life and culture, as well as students of French history; literature, and art.
Dr. Chris Walsh’s scholarship has resulted in a new study on one of America’s leading authors. In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy offers close textual analysis of all of McCarthy’s Southern works along with an overview of the notable critical responses to them. The book is designed for use by scholars, teachers, and students at all levels.
McCarthy’s works set in the desert Southwest have received substantial critical and commercial acclaim. However, his Appalachian texts—which include two short stories written as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, five novels (including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Road), a play, and a screenplay—rival the Southwestern works in terms of their aesthetic achievement and complexity. In the Wake of the Sun introduces readers, scholars, and students to the pertinent themes in each text while also walking them through the most significant critical dialogues surrounding the texts.
Born in Australia, novelist Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city, in which the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden constantly became reanimated by new experiences, as Hazzard was joined in her travels by her husband, the editor and critic Francis Steegmuller. In The Incident at Naples, a classic essay first published by the New Yorker, Steegmuller recollects on how he was, as a tourist to the city, robbed and injured and then treated in a series of hospitals. What can The Incident at Naples teach us? A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as Hazzard and Steegmuller discover, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it.
Returning to Nova Scotia every summer contributes to the illusion of smooth continuance, each summer not the first thread in a new fabric but another button on a cardigan, perhaps looser than buttons below but still familiar and comfortable. Every summer the songs of white-throated sparrows bounce from scrub like novelty tunes from the fifties. Early in the morning ravens grind woodenly. . . . No matter how slowly I jog, on the headland butterflies spring from my feet in clumps, first azures and orange crescents, then wood nymphs, and finally over the lowlands near the Beaver River outlet cabbage whites spiraling, dizzy with mating.
Indian Summer is the newest collection of personal essays by Sam Pickering. In typical Pickering fashion, he seeks to capture the gift of living. He brings to the page again his family, students, and a wealth of country characters who live in places that exist only in his imagination and who wander through the stories he tells.
Nelson Mandela brought the poetry of Ingrid Jonker to the attention of South Africa and the wider world when he read her poem “Die kind” (The Child) at the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994. Though Jonker was already a significant figure in South African literary circles, Mandela’s reference contributed to a revival of interest in Jonker and her work that continues to this day.
Viljoen’s biography illuminates the brief and dramatic life of Jonker, who created a literary oeuvre—as searing in its intensity as it is brief—before taking her own life at the age of thirty-one. Jonker wrote against a background of escalating apartheid laws, violent repression of black political activists, and the banning of the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress. Viljoen tells the story of Ingrid Jonker in the political and cultural context of her time, provides sensitive insights into her poetry, and considers the reasons for the enduring fascination with her life and death.
Her writings, her association with bohemian literary circles, and her identification with the oppressed brought her into conflict with her father, a politician in the white ruling party, and with other authority figures from her Afrikaner background. Her life and work demonstrate the difficulty and importance of artistic endeavor in a place of terrible conflict.
Between 1919 and his death by suicide in 1963, Arthur Crew Inman wrote what is surely one of the fullest diaries ever kept by any American. Convinced that his bid for immortality required complete candor, he held nothing back. This abridgment of the original 155 volumes is at once autobiography, social chronicle, and an apologia addressed to unborn readers.
Into this fascinating record Inman poured memories of a privileged Atlanta childhood, disastrous prep-school years, a nervous collapse in college followed by a bizarre life of self-diagnosed invalidism. Confined to a darkened room in his Boston apartment, he lived vicariously: through newspaper advertisements he hired “talkers” to tell him the stories of their lives, and he wove their strange histories into the diary. Young women in particular fascinated him. He studied their moods, bought them clothes, fondled them, and counseled them on their love affairs. His marriage in 1923 to Evelyn Yates, the heroine of the diary, survived a series of melodramatic episodes. While reflecting on national politics, waifs and revolutions, Inman speaks directly about his fears, compulsions, fantasies, and nightmares, coaxing the reader into intimacy with him. Despite his shocking self-disclosures he emerges as an oddly impressive figure.
This compelling work is many things: a case history of a deeply troubled man; the story of a transplanted and self-conscious southerner; a historical overview of Boston illuminated with striking cityscapes; an odd sort of American social history. But chiefly it is, as Inman himself came to see, a gigantic nonfiction novel, a new literary form. As it moves inexorably toward a powerful denouement, The Inman Diary is an addictive narrative.
“Inventing Edward Lear is an exceptional, valuable, original study, presenting new materials on aspects of Lear’s life and work.”
—Jenny Uglow, author of Mr. Lear and The Lunar Men
Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” but the father of nonsense was far more than a poet. He was a naturalist, a brilliant landscape painter, an experimental travel writer, and an accomplished composer. Sara Lodge presents the fullest account yet of Lear’s passionate engagement in the intellectual, social, and cultural life of his times.
Lear had a difficult start in life. He was epileptic, asthmatic, and depressive, but even as a child a consummate performer who projected himself into others’ affections. He became, by John James Audubon’s estimate, one of the greatest ornithological artists of the age. Queen Victoria—an admirer—chose him to be her painting teacher. He popularized the limerick, set Tennyson’s verse to music, and opened fresh doors for children and adults to share fantasies of magical escape. Lodge draws on diaries, letters, and new archival sources to paint a vivid picture of Lear that explores his musical influences, his religious nonconformity, his relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and the connections between his scientific and artistic work. He invented himself as a character: awkward but funny, absurdly sympathetic. In Lodge’s hands, Lear emerges as a dynamic and irreverent polymath whose conversation continues to draw us in.
Inventing Edward Lear is an original and moving account of one of the most intriguing and creative of all Victorians.
Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman--as Virginia Woolf suggested when, in A Room of One's Own, she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens.
This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image. And she contrasts her story with that of Eugénie Sellers Strong, a younger contemporary and onetime intimate, the author of major work on Roman art and once a glittering figure at the British School in Rome--but who lost the race for renown. The setting for the story of Harrison's career is Classical scholarship in this period--its internal arguments and allegiances and especially the influence of the anthropological strain most strikingly exemplified by Sir James Frazer. Questioning the common criteria for identifying intellectual "influence" and "movements," Beard exposes the mythology that is embedded in the history of Classics. At the same time she provides a vivid picture of a sparkling intellectual scene. The Invention of Jane Harrison offers shrewd history and undiluted fun.
Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon never met, their lively and topical conversation, initiated in 1842, continued unabated until 1845, about a year before the painter’s suicide. It was a somewhat lopsided correspondence in which ninety-four letters written by Haydon, most of which have not been published before, received fewer replies from Miss Barrett, twenty-eight of which are included in this book. Judging from the contents of the letters, the epistolary friendship was truly meaningful to both. To Miss Barrett, Haydon was “my dear kind friend”; he was far more effusive, addressing her as “you Ingenious little darling invisible” and “my dearest dream & invisible intellectuality.”
In spite of Haydon’s frequent pleas for a meeting, Miss Barrett never agreed to receive him. However, as the correspondence progressed, they exchanged more and more confidences and each recognized the other as a responsive and sympathetic listener. With complete candor Haydon admitted at one point that egotism was the basis of his pleasure in the correspondence; “I never ask what you are doing,” he wrote, “but take it for granted what I am doing must be delightful to you.”
Evincing warmth and poignancy, the letters range over a variety of colorful subjects covering art, literature, current events, and gossip. The Elgin Marbles and Queen Victoria are discussed, and the correspondents air opposing views on mesmerism and Napoleon versus Wellington. After a thoughtful introduction which provides background information on Miss Barrett and Haydon, Willard Pope presents the letters—carefully annotated with identifying information on people, places, and current events—in chronological order.
This profile of the man and the writer is an introduction to the personality behind The Chapman Report and The Fan Club. Through correspondence, diaries, manuscript annotations, interviews and other private sources, the profile reveals the man who began as a sports stringer for a Wisconsin newspaper and is now one of the world's most popular novelists.
In this vivid biography, Florence Noiville offers a glimpse into the world of this much-loved but persistently elusive writer: Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer (1904–91) is generally recognized as the most popular Yiddish writer of the twentieth century. His widely translated body of work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, is beloved around the world. But although Singer was a very public and outgoing figure, much about his personal life remains unknown.
Singer was greatly influenced by his early years in Poland, with his rabbi father and rationalist, secular mother. His interest in themes of faith and dilemma stem directly from this set of conflicts; he bounced back and forth between revering and fighting orthodoxy. This was not the only paradox in his life, however: this man, who wrote many successful children’s books, had abandoned his first wife and only son in Poland as the Nazis began to sweep across Europe. His novels and stories are recognized for their mystical, folkloric tone and his public image was that of a grandfather or uncle; but he was wracked with self-doubt, a womanizer, and, as Noiville writes, a “modern virtuoso of anguish, inhibition, and fiasco.”
Noiville speaks to these and other paradoxes surrounding her subject, drawing on letters, personal stories, Singer’s own autobiographies, and interviews with friends, family, and publishing contemporaries. She travels as he did, from Poland to New York to Florida, tracing his journey from penniless immigrant to Nobel laureate. By pursuing Singer’s public and private past, she rebuilds his story and the story of the world he wrote from: a Yiddish world, a Poland removed from history by Nazi Germany.
Isaac Bashevis Singer - American Writers 86 was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer brought the vibrant milieu of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewry to the English-speaking world through his subtle psychological insight, deep sympathy for the eccentricities of Jewish folk custom, and unerring feel for the heroism of everyday life. His novels, including The Family Moskat and Enemies: A Love Story, and his short stories, such as "Yentl" and "Gimpel the Fool," prove him a consummate storyteller and probably the greatest Yiddish writer of the twentieth century.
Born into a Victorian Danish family, Karen Christentze Dinesen married her second cousin, a high-spirited and philandering baron, and moved to Kenya where she ran a coffee plantation, painted, and wrote. She later returned to Denmark, lived through the German occupation during World War II, and became a pivotal figure in Heretica, a major literary movement that flourished in Denmark after the war. By the time of her death, Dinesen was an international figure. Truman Capote would later call Out of Africa one of the most beautiful books of the century.
Despite the popularity of her writing, little is known about her life. For this provocative biography, Pelensky has uncovered hundreds of papers in libraries and private collections, and discovered new interview sources in Africa, Denmark, and England to help put the pieces of Dinesen’s life together. Her father’s outspoken sympathy for the plight of the American Indians, his suicide and the effects of his personal anguish as a failed adventurer are illuminated as major forces on Dinesen’s imagination. The Danish history of romance and masquerade and the tradition of pantomime in Denmark are also explored as themes that recur in Dinesen’s work.
A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden’s early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.
From his first poems in 1922 to the publication of his landmark collection On This Island in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. His early works are prized for their psychological depth, yet Nicholas Jenkins argues that they are political poems as well, illuminating Auden’s intuitions about a key aspect of modern experience: national identity. Two historical forces, in particular, haunted the poet: the catastrophe of World War I and the subsequent “rediscovery” of England’s rural landscapes by artists and intellectuals.
The Island presents a new picture of Auden, the poet and the man, as he explored a genteel, lyrical form of nationalism during these years. His poems reflect on a world in ruins, while cultivating visions of England as a beautiful—if morally compromised—haven. They also reflect aspects of Auden’s personal search for belonging—from his complex relationship with his father, to his quest for literary mentors, to his negotiation of the codes that structured gay life. Yet as Europe veered toward a second immolation, Auden began to realize that poetic myths centered on English identity held little potential. He left the country in 1936 for what became an almost lifelong expatriation, convinced that his role as the voice of Englishness had become an empty one.
Reexamining one of the twentieth century’s most moving and controversial poets, The Island is a fresh account of his early works and a striking parable about the politics of modernism. Auden’s preoccupations with the vicissitudes of war, the trials of love, and the problems of identity are of their time. Yet they still resonate profoundly today.
William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an “orphan,” Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.
It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen’s life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen’s relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen’s life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.
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