Van Wyck Brooks - American Writers 71 was first published in 1968. 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.
Engrossing and enlightening, Vardis Fisher illuminates the acclaimed author's impact on Mormon culture, American letters, and the literary tradition of the American West.
Ilya Vinitsky's Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia is the first major study in English of Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852)—a poet, translator of German romantic verse, and, crucially, mentor of Pushkin. It focuses overdue attention to an important figure in Russian literary and cultural history.
Vinitsky’s "psychological biography" argues that Zhukovsky very consciously set out to create for himself an emotional life that reflected his unique brand of romanticism, different from what we associate with Pushkin or poets such as Byron or Wordsworth. For Zhukovsky, ideal love was harmonious, built on a mystical foundation of spiritual kinship. Vinitsky shows how Zhukovksy played a pivotal role in the evolution of ideas central to Russia’s literary and cultural identity from the end of the eighteenth century into the decades following the Napoleonic Wars.
The "first lady of Argentine letters," Victoria Ocampo is best known as the architect of cultural bridges between the American and European continents and as the founder and director of Sur, an influential South American literary review and publishing house.
In this first biographical study in English of "la superbe Argentine," originally published in 1979, Doris Meyer considers Victoria Ocampo's role in introducing European and North American writers and artists to the South American public—through the pages of her review, through translations of their work, and through lecture tours and recitations. She examines Ocampo's personal relationships with some of the most illustrious writers and thinkers of this century—including José Ortega y Gasset, Rabindranath Tagore, Count Hermann Keyserling, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Monnier, Vita Sackville-West, Gabriela Mistral, and many others. And she portrays an extraordinary woman who rebelled against the strictures of family and social class to become a leading personality in the fight for women's rights in Argentina and, later, a steadfast opponent of the Perón regime, for which she was sent to jail in 1953.
Fifteen of Victoria Ocampo's essays, selected from her more than ten volumes of prose and translated by Doris Meyer, complement the biographical study.
Best known for his deeply controversial 1955 novel, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is celebrated as one of the most distinctive literary stylists of the twentieth century. In Vladimir Nabokov, Barbara Wyllie presents a comprehensive account of the life and works of the writer, from his childhood and earliest stories in pre-revolutionary Russia, to The Original of Laura—a novel written almost entirely on index cards published for the first time in 2009, perhaps against Nabokov’s wishes.
This literary biography investigates the author’s poetry and prose, in both Russian and English, and examines the relationship between Nabokov’s extraordinary erudition and the themes that recur throughout his works. His expertise as a specialist in butterflies complemented his wide knowledge of Russian and Western European culture, philosophy, and history, and informed the themes of transformation and transcendence that dominate his work. Wyllie traces his lifelong preoccupations with time, memory, and mortality across both his Russian and English works, and she illuminates his distinctive through detailed analysis of his major novels. Wyllie assesses his poetry and prose style alongside Nabokov’s own autobiography, letters, and critical writings—as well as the only recently-published The Original of Laura—in order to create a complete and updated picture of the writer in the context of his works.
Vladimir Nabokov presents a fascinating portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most eclectic, prolific, and controversial authors. It is an essential read for fans of Nabokov and scholars of twentieth century English and Russian literature.
Vladimir Nabokov - American Writers 96 was first published in 1971. 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.
Hailing from the small river town of Moundsville, West Virginia, Davis Grubb (1919–1980) became a key figure in the canon of Appalachian literature. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories and radio plays, Grubb’s writings, as Tom Douglass observes, “catalogued his life”—and a turbulent life it was, marked by the traumatic loss of both the family home and his father during the Great Depression, the overbearing affections of his mother, the fear of failure, painful struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, profligate spending, and a conflicted sexuality.
Grubb originally aspired to be a visual artist but, thwarted by color blindness, turned to writing instead, honing his skills in the advertising industry. Today he is best remembered for his first novel, The Night of the Hunter (1953), a gripping story of a Depression-era serial killer and his pursuit of two young children along the Ohio River. This book spent twenty-eight weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and became the basis for a classic film directed by Charles Laughton, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. While his subsequent work never achieved that same level of popularity, the fierce thematic oppositions he set forth in his debut novel—between love and hate, good and evil, the corrupt and the pure, the rich and the poor—would inform his entire oeuvre. Although Grubb’s career took him to the great cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, his work was always rooted in key emblems of his Appalachian childhood—the river, the state penitentiary, and the largest Indian mound east of the Mississippi, all in his native Moundsville.
In his works, Douglass asserts, Grubb was “an avenging angel, righting the wrongs of the past in his own life, in his own country, and putting trust in his own vision of divine love.” Off the page, he was riven by personal demons, “more than once in danger of losing his life to self-annihilation and to the self-accusation that he was a fallen angel.” This biography, the first ever written of Grubb, captures his life and work in all their intriguing complexity.
THOMAS E. DOUGLASS, an associate professor of English at East Carolina University, is the author of A Room Forever: The Life, Work, and Letters of Breece D’J Pancake. He is also the fiction editor for the University of Tennessee Press’s Appalachian Echoes series.
Hailing from the small river town of Moundsville, West Virginia, Davis Grubb (1919–1980) became a key figure in the canon of Appalachian literature. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories and radio plays, Grubb’s writings, as Tom Douglass observes, “catalogued his life”—and a turbulent life it was, marked by the traumatic loss of both the family home and his father during the Great Depression, the overbearing affections of his mother, the fear of failure, painful struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, profligate spending, and a conflicted sexuality.
Grubb originally aspired to be a visual artist but, thwarted by color blindness, turned to writing instead, honing his skills in the advertising industry. Today he is best remembered for his first novel, The Night of the Hunter (1953), a gripping story of a Depression-era serial killer and his pursuit of two young children along the Ohio River. This book spent twenty-eight weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and became the basis for a classic film directed by Charles Laughton, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. While his subsequent work never achieved that same level of popularity, the fierce thematic oppositions he set forth in his debut novel—between love and hate, good and evil, the corrupt and the pure, the rich and the poor—would inform his entire oeuvre. Although Grubb’s career took him to the great cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, his work was always rooted in key emblems of his Appalachian childhood—the river, the state penitentiary, and the largest Indian mound east of the Mississippi, all in his native Moundsville.
In his works, Douglass asserts, Grubb was “an avenging angel, righting the wrongs of the past in his own life, in his own country, and putting trust in his own vision of divine love.” Off the page, he was riven by personal demons, “more than once in danger of losing his life to self-annihilation and to the self-accusation that he was a fallen angel.” This biography, the first ever written of Grubb, captures his life and work in all their intriguing complexity.
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