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716 books match the query 'Literary Figures' and 11 start with o

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Octavia E. Butler

Gerry Canavan

University of Illinois Press, 2016

"I began writing about power because I had so little," Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman--an alien in American society and among science fiction writers--informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction.

Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.

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Odyssey of a Wandering Mind

The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author

Jennifer Horne

University of Alabama Press, 2024

A carefully rendered portrait of a brilliant but troubled daughter of the Old South who struggled against the conventions of gender, class, family, and ultimately of sanity, yet survived to define a creative life of her own

Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama’s governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly managed the family landholdings before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theater. Inventing a plastic compound while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as a journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and even a young John F. Kennedy, while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she struggled to find her way with both work and family, becoming increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years.

Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts—sometimes delusional, always savvy—to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of “having been restored to sanity,” enabling her to manage her own financial affairs and to live how and where she pleased. She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel based on the life of Mona Lisa, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Sara Mayfield left behind to sensitively render Mayfield’s struggle to move through the world as the person she was—and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story.

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On James Baldwin

Colm Tóibín

Brandeis University Press, 2024

Colm Tóibín’s personal account of encountering James Baldwin’s work, published in Baldwin’s centenary year.

Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired by the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tóibín found a writer who would be a lifelong companion and exemplar.

From On James Baldwin

Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

On James Baldwin is a magnificent contemporary author’s tribute to one of his most consequential literary progenitors.

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Oriana Fallaci

The Woman and the Myth

Santo L. Aricò

Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

Internationally acclaimed as a journalist, war correspondent, interviewer, and novelist, Oriana Fallaci’s public persona reached almost mythic proportions. It is a myth Fallaci herself created, according to Santo L. Aricò, who probes the psychological forces that motivated one of the twentieth century’s most famous and successful women writers.

Using his own extensive interviews with the writer, Aricò maps out Fallaci’s journey through life, paying particular attention to her ongoing and painstaking attempts to establish her own mythical status. He first examines her career as a literary journalist, emphasizing the high quality of her writing. From there, he concentrates on how Fallaci’s personal image began to emerge in her writings, as well as the way in which, through her powerful narratives, she catapulted herself into the public eye as her own main character.

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Oscar Wilde in America

The Interviews

Edited by Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.

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Ouida

Cosmopolitan Ethics, Aesthetics, and Legacies

Frankie Dytor and Helena Esser

Ohio University Press, 0

Outspoken, extravagant, and internationally celebrated in her lifetime, Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839–1908) was one of the nineteenth century’s most successful and controversial writers. Her fiction, essays, and cultural criticism captivated readers across Europe and beyond, yet her polemical politics, cosmopolitan outlook, and opulent style left her at odds with the modernist critical traditions that shaped later literary scholarship. As a result, despite her considerable influence, Ouida has remained on the margins of Victorian literary history. Ouida: Cosmopolitan Ethics, Aesthetics, and Legacies offers the first sustained examination of the ethical and aesthetic commitments that underpin Ouida’s work and its effect on nineteenth-century culture. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, the collection explores her writing through frameworks including psychogeography, ecocriticism, decadence studies, celebrity studies, and adaptation studies. Contributors reveal how Ouida challenged conventional boundaries of nation, gender, class, and species while shaping contemporary debates about art, politics, and society. Opening with a conversation between Victorian literary scholars Pamela K. Gilbert and Talia Schaffer, the volume traces Ouida’s influence across literary networks, media forms, and historical periods, from her impact on fellow authors and feminist modernists to her afterlives in adaptation, fandom, and participatory culture. Positioning Ouida as a profoundly cosmopolitan thinker and writer, the collection reconsiders the boundaries of Victorian studies itself, demonstrating how nineteenth-century literature can be understood through dynamic exchanges across genres, borders, media, and time. In doing so, it restores Ouida to a central place in literary history while highlighting the enduring relevance of her global legacy. Contributors Katja Anderson Natasha Anderson Joseph Bristow Lorraine Dubuisson Frankie Dytor Jesse R. Erickson Helena Esser Pamela K. Gilbert Andrew King Jane Jordan Crescent Rainwater Talia Schaffer Margaret D. Stetz Joanna Turner

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Our Best Friend in America

The Soviet Afterlife of Mark Twain

Cassio de Oliveira

University of Wisconsin Press, 2027

In 1960, the popular Soviet magazine Krokodil dubbed Mark Twain the USSR’s “American Friend No. 1.” This surprised neither the Kremlin nor the magazine’s readers: Twain and especially his Mississippi novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were favorites throughout the Soviet period, with the first translations dating to before the Bolshevik Revolution and film adaptations continuing to appear into the 1980s. Cassio de Oliveira explores why and how such a decidedly American writer came to occupy pride of place in a nation so emphatically opposed to American culture. How exactly did Twain become the Soviet Union’s “best friend in America”? How did that friendship change, and what did it signify, throughout the long and fickle decades of Soviet cultural policy and the Cold War?

What emerges from this complex history is not just the story of a single author’s foreign fortunes but also the history of Soviet literature as well as Soviet–American cultural interactions, which are revealed to have been more multifaceted and variable than might be assumed. Twain’s reception in the USSR also speaks to the largely hidden history of world literature in translation, even during decades of fraught geopolitical confrontation.

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