BiblioVault

Dreamer of the Ghetto

The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill

Joseph H. Udelson

University of Alabama Press, 1990

"An impressive achievement. . . . Udelson provides a trenchant analysis of Zangwill's works set within a historical context, i.e., Jewish emancipation and the dilemma of how one might remain fully Jewish while becoming fully modern, that helps to illuminate Zangwill's life as well as his writings."

—Jewish Book News

"By carefully following the threads of Zangwill's own divided self through the labyrinths of his life and writings, Udelson convinces us not only of the author's startling political prescience, but that he embodies attitudes now shared by almost all secular Jews as a result of events Zangwill did not witness—Nazism and the founding of Israel."

—Shofar

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The Great Television Race

A History of the American Television Industry, 1925-1941

Joseph H. Udelson

University of Alabama Press, 1989

Television was first successfully demonstrated in 1925; and in 1941 the Federal Communications Commission authorized commercial telecasting in the United States. During the intervening sixteen years the technology of television had been revolutionized, and there had been created an integrated television system. These developments were accomplished amid intense engineering and corporate rivalries of international scope. The result of this competition was the formation of the American television industry composed of three distinct systems: the engineering, the programming, and the promotional. The industry had already reached maturity by the eve of the Second World War, and only the world-wide wartime disruptions prevented its immediate marketing.

The author has utilized a broad range of original sources in order to trace the American television industry from its inception until its commercialization. He demonstrates that the present monochromatic television standards, programming potentials, networking requirements, commercial promotion, and audience research have been the results of incremental achievements accomplished prior to America’s entry into World War II. He analyzes the engineering processes and describes the corporate jockeying for position in the infant industry; and he demonstrates the prominent role played by the federal government in the history of the entire enterprise.

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Bowed Some, Chanted a Little

Philip Whalen's Zen Journals and the San Francisco Renaissance

Brian Unger

University of Alabama Press, 2023

The literary journals of a key figure in both the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the New American Poetry, and an ordained Zen Buddhist priest

Philip Whalen (1923–2002) authored twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. But he came to regard his literary journals as his most important prose legacy.

Whalen’s literary work represents a significant turn in American letters, as he and his closest colleagues immersed themselves in East Asian literature and religion, reinvigorating strikingly new linguistic and aesthetic paths for North American writers and artists. However, until now Whalen’s forty-plus years of journals—sixty small eight-by-six-inch notebooks—have been largely inaccessible, archived in the rare book and manuscript library at the University of California, Berkeley, undigitized and unavailable online. Thus, the publication of a critical scholarly edition of Whalen’s journals and notebooks constitutes an important literary event and an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, poets, and lay readers who follow twentieth-century North American poetry.

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Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Darlene Harbour Unrue

University of Alabama Press, 2010

Katherine Anne Porter Remembered is a collection of reminiscences and memoirs by contemporaries, friends, and associates of Porter offering a revealing and intimate portrait of the elusive and complex American writer.

From a fractured and vagabond girlhood in Texas, Porter led a wildly itinerant life that took her through five marriages, innumerable love affairs, and homes in Colorado, New York, Paris, Mexico, Louisiana, California, and Maryland. With very little formal education, she grew through sheer force of will to become a major American writer of short stories and the author of several books including Flowering Judas and other stories; Ship of Fools; Pale Horse; Pale Ride; Noon Wine; and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Because of Porter’s own dissembling and half-truths about her life, as well as the numerous factual errors that persist in biographical entries and literary dictionaries, a complete and accurate portrait of her life has been hard to establish. The 63 reminiscences gathered in this book paint a vivid portrait of Porter and are testaments to her extraordinary beauty, her gift for mesmerizing and charming audiences and friends, her yearnings for a lasting home, her delusions about love, the astonishing range and scope of her reading, her sharp tongue and vindictiveness, and her final paranoid renunciations of friends and family. Along the way, Porter formed friendships with Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Hardwick, Flannery O’Connor, and Cleanth Brooks whose remembrances of her are included in this volume.

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More Than Science and Sputnik

The National Defense Education Act of 1958

Wayne J. Urban

University of Alabama Press, 2010

A behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the National Defense Education Act.

Sparked by dramatic Soviet achievements, particularly in nuclear technology and the development of the Sputnik space orbiter, the United States responded in the late 1950s with an extraordinary federal investment in education. Designed to overcome a perceived national failure to produce enough qualified scientists, engineers, and mathematicians to compete with the Communist bloc, the effort resulted in the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA). Representative Carl Elliott and Senator Lister Hill both from Alabama, and then Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliot Richardson were the prime movers in shaping of this landmark legislation.

More than Science and Sputnik analyzes primary documents of the three leaders to describe the political process that established the NDEA. The book illustrates what the assumptions of the key players were, and why they believed the act was needed.

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