front cover of The American Essay in the American Century
The American Essay in the American Century
Ned Stuckey-French
University of Missouri Press, 2011
In modern culture, the essay is often considered an old-fashioned, unoriginal form of literary styling. The word essay brings to mind the uninspired five-paragraph theme taught in schools around the country or the antiquated, Edwardian meanderings of English gentlemen rattling on about art and old books. These connotations exist despite the fact that Americans have been reading and enjoying personal essays in popular magazines for decades, engaging with a multitude of ideas through this short-form means of expression.
 
To defend the essay—that misunderstood staple of first-year composition courses—Ned Stuckey-French has written The American Essay in the American Century. This book uncovers the buried history of the American personal essay and reveals how it played a significant role in twentieth-century cultural history.
 
In the early 1900s, writers and critics debated the “death of the essay,” claiming it was too traditional to survive the era’s growing commercialism, labeling it a bastion of British upper-class conventions. Yet in that period, the essay blossomed into a cultural force as a new group of writers composed essays that responded to the concerns of America’s expanding cosmopolitan readership. These essays would spark the “magazine revolution,” giving a fresh voice to the ascendant middle class of the young century.
 
With extensive research and a cultural context, Stuckey-French describes the many reasons essays grew in appeal and importance for Americans. He also explores the rise of E. B. White, considered by many the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century whose prowess was overshadowed by his success in other fields of writing. White’s work introduced a new voice, creating an American essay that melded seriousness and political resolve with humor and self-deprecation. This book is one of the first to consider and reflect on the contributions of E. B. White to the personal essay tradition and American culture more generally.
 
The American Essay in the American Century is a compelling, highly readable book that illuminates the history of a secretly beloved literary genre. A work that will appeal to fiction readers, scholars, and students alike, this book offers fundamental insight into modern American literary history and the intersections of literature, culture, and class through the personal essay. This thoroughly researched volume dismisses, once and for all, the “death of the essay,” proving that the essay will remain relevant for a very long time to come.
[more]

front cover of A Conspiratorial Life
A Conspiratorial Life
Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism
Edward H. Miller
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The first full-scale biography of Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society and planted some of modern conservatism’s most insidious seeds.
 
Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right.

A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.
 
[more]

logo for University of Iowa Press
E.B. White
The Emergence of an Essayist
Robert L., Jr. Root
University of Iowa Press, 1999
In E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist, Robert Root traces the literary career of the best-known and most widely admired American essayist of the twentieth century.
Root explores the milieu in which White began writing the "Notes and Comments" section of the New Yorker and puts in perspective the influence of popular "colyumists" like Don Marquis and Christopher Morley on the tone and form of White's work as a "paragrapher." He examines White's persistent disaffection with the demands and limitations inherent in his "Comment" pieces for the New Yorker and his experiences as a columnist for Harper's Magazine, where his "One Man's Meat" feature produced his most enduring essay, "Once More to the Lake," and took the segmented column form to new levels of accomplishment. Drawing on White's manuscripts, Root's literary analysis of early drafts demonstrates how unique White's essays were.
E. B. White greatly expanded the limits of literary nonfiction and in the process introduced elements and methods that helped produce the contemporary segmented or disjunctive essay. From Root's research we receive new insights into the process by which White created his essays and how he was influenced—and often constrained—by particular literary forms and by the limitations of the circumstances in which he wrote them. White was famous for his habit of "writing by ear," and he believed in "writing a thing first and thinking about it afterward," work habits that led to some of the most memorable American literary essays of the twentieth century.
E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist is the most detailed study to date of White as an essayist and a significant contribution to the literature examining writers at work.
[more]

front cover of Hero of the Angry Sky
Hero of the Angry Sky
The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace
David S. Ingalls
Ohio University Press, 2012

Hero of the Angry Sky draws on the unpublished diaries, correspondence, informal memoir, and other personal documents of the U.S. Navy’s only flying “ace” of World War I to tell his unique story. David S. Ingalls was a prolific writer, and virtually all of his World War I aviation career is covered, from the teenager’s early, informal training in Palm Beach, Florida, to his exhilarating and terrifying missions over the Western Front. This edited collection of Ingalls’s writing details the career of the U.S. Navy’s most successful combat flyer from that conflict.

While Ingalls’s wartime experiences are compelling at a personal level, they also illuminate the larger, but still relatively unexplored, realm of early U.S. naval aviation. Ingalls’s engaging correspondence offers a rare personal view of the evolution of naval aviation during the war, both at home and abroad. There are no published biographies of navy combat flyers from this period, and just a handful of diaries and letters in print, the last appearing more than twenty years ago. Ingalls’s extensive letters and diaries add significantly to historians’ store of available material.

[more]

front cover of Philadelphia Maestros
Philadelphia Maestros
Ormandy, Muti, Sawallisch
Phyllis Rodriquez-Peralta
Temple University Press, 2006
Over the past century, the Philadelphia Orchestra has earned its reputation as one of the finest orchestras in the world. Philadelphia Maestros tells the tale of this marvelous orchestra through the tenures of three conductors: Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. With their singular approaches to sound and public image, all three maestros left an indelible mark on the Orchestra, and the cultural life of the city of Philadelphia. A lifelong fan and scholar of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Phyllis White Rodríguez-Peralta paints intimate portraits of the conductors using archival material and interviews with musicians, including pianists Gary Graffman and Lang Lang, and violinist Sarah Chang. Rodríguez-Peralta's text captivates as she recounts Eugene Ormandy's performance as a last-minute substitute for guest conductor Arturo Toscanini; Riccardo Muti's magnetic presence and international fame; and the role of Wolfgang Sawallisch in moving the Orchestra to its grand new hall at the Kimmel Center. Engaging and entertaining, Philadelphia Maestros will be a welcome addition to any aficionado's bookshelf.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter