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A powerful memoir of love, survival, and resilience, told through intimate letters

In Echoes of Cabrini-Green, Rudolph Elliot Willis tells the story of his journey from Chicago’s most notorious public housing project to the halls of academia and medicine. Framed as heartfelt letters written after his mother’s death, this deeply personal narrative reflects on a childhood shaped by systemic poverty, racism, and uncertainty, showing how faith, education, and resilience can remake lives.

Willis recalls the daily struggles of growing up Black in a family of ten children in Cabrini-Green—hunger, fear, and the constant threat of violence—alongside glimpses of neighborly solidarity, faith, and perseverance. He watched his father, a decorated veteran, retreat into silence and alcoholism while his mother’s frustration flared into anger. Throughout it all, she remained a moral compass. Her faith in God, unwavering work ethic, and quiet dignity gave her children a vision of something better.

A summer at a Christian camp introduced Willis to serenity and the grounding power of faith. A passion for reading and a gift for learning propelled him to an elite high school, where he wrestled with the dissonance between two worlds. But because of his mother’s enduring belief in education as a shield against the harsh realities of the world, he was ultimately able to thrive.

Willis went on to graduate from Northwestern University and earn a medical degree, eventually becoming an oncologist and scientific researcher. In these letters, he shares with his mother his successes and setbacks, the triumphs and struggles of his siblings, his grief following their deaths, and the haunting demolition of Cabrini-Green—the place that shaped him and so many others. Past, present, and future collapse: the crisp white coats and hallowed halls of medical school give way to the stained cinderblocks and echoing gunshots of Cabrini-Green. Willis looks into the eyes of patients and finds his siblings staring back at him. He realizes Cabrini-Green is not simply a memory—it is part of his identity, the crucible that formed him into who he is.

With lyrical prose and unflinching honesty, Echoes of Cabrini-Green is an invitation to imagine change in communities too often defined only by hardship; a testament to the power of faith, education, and personal resolve to transform lives; and a call to recognize the dignity and potential that endure even in the most neglected places.

This captivating biography traces the life of Eliza Fenwick, an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country as writer, teacher, and school owner.

Lissa Paul brings to light Fenwick’s letters for the first time to reveal the relationships she developed with many key figures of her era, and to tell Fenwick’s story as depicted by the woman herself. Fenwick began as a writer in the radical London of the 1790s, a member of Mary Wollstonecraft’s circle, and when her marriage crumbled, she became a prolific author of children’s literature to support her family. Eventually Fenwick moved to Barbados, becoming the owner of a school while confronting the reality of slavery in the British colonies. She would go on to establish schools in numerous cities in the United States and Canada, all the while taking care of her daughter and grandchildren and maintaining her friendships through letters that, as presented here, tell the story of her life.

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

An annotated selection of unpublished letters by Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister.

Retrieved from seven different libraries, this corpus of letters was preserved by the Manning family chiefly for their value as records of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work; but they ironically also illuminate the life and mind of a fascinating correspondent and citizen of New England with incisive views and commentaries on her contemporaries, her role as a woman writer, Boston and Salem literary culture, and family life in mid-19th-century America.

This book illuminates Elizabeth's early life; the trauma caused for sister and brother by the death of their father; her and her brother's education; and the tensions the two children experienced when they moved in with their mother's family, the welthier Mannings, instead of the poorer though socially more venerable Hawthornes, following their father's death.  The letters portray Elizabeth's constrained relationship with Nathaniel's wife Sofia Peabody and counter Sophia's portrayal of her sister-in-law as a recluse, oddity, and “queer scribbler.”

These 118 letters also reveal Elizabeth Hawthorne's tremendous gifts as a thinker, correspondent, and essayist, her interest in astronomy, a lifelong drive toward self-edification in many fields, and her extraordinary relationship with Nathaniel.  As a sibling and a fellow author, they were sometimes lovingly codependent and sometimes competitive.  Finally, her writing reveals the larger worlds of politics, war, the literary landscape, class, family life, and the freedoms and constraints of a woman's role, all by a heretofore understudied figure.