front cover of Edith Wharton's Inner Circle
Edith Wharton's Inner Circle
By Susan Goodman
University of Texas Press, 1994

When Edith Wharton became friends with Henry James, she joined a group of men who became her "inner circle." This group included both well-known figures, such as James, Percy Lubbock, and Bernard Berenson, and several now forgotten, including John Hugh Smith, Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Robert Norton, and Howard Sturgis.

Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, Susan Goodman here presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored. She explores how the group, which began forming around 1904 and lasted until Wharton's death in 1937, defined itself against the society its founders had left in the United States, while simultaneously criticizing and accommodating the one it found in Europe. Tracing Wharton's individual relationships with these men and their relationships with one another, she examines literary kinships and movements in the biographical and feminist context of gender, exile, and aesthetics. She also relates the group to other literary circles, such as the Bloomsbury group and Gertrude Stein's salon.

[more]

front cover of The Eleventh House
The Eleventh House
Memoirs
Hudson Strode, Introduction by Don Noble
University of Alabama Press, 1975
"Every place I visited," says Hudson Strode, "was like a surprise package to be opened, and I untied the strings with high expectations." Reading The Eleventh House: Memoirs is like going to a party of smartly dressed guests.
 
Strode starts his foreign travels in Sorrento with Dante's descendant Count Dante Serego-Alighieri as his guide. He takes a Russian cattle boat to Tunisia and lunches with the lovely Countess de Brazza. Then he embarks on a whirlwind tour of South America and writes South by Thunderbird. Later, in England, he visits Rebecca West at her country home and strikes up a warm friendship with Lady Astor. In Denmark his hostess is Isak Dinesen. In Finland he meets Jan Sibelius.
 
Such are the times of Hudson Strode. With his keen eye for settings, with candor, energy, and curiosity, Strode sees his famous friends closely and wholly. His is a unique account.

The Eleventh House is the story of a rewarding and fascinating life told by a man who remembers it all with affection. He tells it for the record and as great entertainment.
[more]

front cover of Eugene O'Neill Remembered
Eugene O'Neill Remembered
Edited by Brenda Murphy and George Monteiro
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Eugene O’Neill Remembered offers new views into the playwright’s life by capturing the direct memories of those who were close to him through interviews, memoirs, and other recollections. These sixty-two remembrances create an unprecedented image of O’Neill.

Known principally as the author of some of the most significant plays in the American dramatic canon and as one of America’s Nobel Laureates in literature, O'Neill rarely gave interviews and offered few details about himself. As a consequence, his life has long been shrouded in myth. He also abetted some of the misconceptions about his youth by, for example, advocating the story that he was expelled from Princeton for throwing a rock through Woodrow Wilson's window or by exaggerating the amount of time he had spent at sea. The legend of the hard-drinking, tormented playwright with a grim view of life was further reinforced when Long Day's Journey into Night was produced in 1956, three years after his death instead of the twenty-five years he had insisted on.
 
The portrayal of O’Neill as a tragic figure has been solidified in a number of biographies. The purpose of this collection, however, is to present O'Neill as others saw him and described him in their first-person accounts. In the course of these reminiscences, many of the vast and various narrators conflict with and contradict each other. Unlike other accounts of O’Neill’s life, much of the focus is on impressions instead of facts. The result is a revealing composite portrait of a key figure in twentieth-century American literary history.
 
This extensive collection offers insights unavailable in any other book and will hold massive appeal for scholars and students interested in American literature, Eugene O’Neill, and theater history, as well as anyone keen to uncover intimate details of the life of one of America’s greatest writers.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter