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Winner, 2017 Ned Shank Award for Outstanding Preservation Publication from Preserve Arkansas

Shadow Patterns: Reflections on Fay Jones and His Architecture is a collection of critical essays and personal accounts of the man the American Institute of Architects honored with its highest award, the Gold Medal, in 1990.

The essays range from the academic, with appreciations and observations by Juhanni Palaasma and Robert McCarter and Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, to personal reflections by clients and friends. Two of Arkansas’s most accomplished writers, Roy Reed and Ellen Gilchrist, who each live in Fay Jones houses, have provided intimate portrayals of what it’s like to live in, and manage the quirks of, a “house built by a genius,” where “light is everywhere. . . . Everything is quiet, and everything is a surprise,” as Gilchrist says.

Through this compendium of perspectives, readers will learn about Jones’s personal qualities, including his strong will, his ability to convince other people of the rightness of his ideas, and yet his willingness, at times, to change his mind. We also enter into the work: powerful architecture like Stoneflower and Thorncrown Chapel and Pinecote Pavilion, along with private residences ranging from the modest to the monumental. And we learn about his relationship with his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Shadow Patterns broadens and enriches our understanding of this major figure in American architecture of the twentieth century.

Shakespeare and baseball are monuments of high and popular culture: Shakespeare is the most widely read and staged playwright in the world, and baseball is America’s game. Professor Samuel Crowl, a prize-winning teacher and international scholar of Shakespeare on film, explores his life as a champion of the Bard and a fan of the Detroit Tigers. He saw his first Tigers game in the summer of 1950 (Hal Newhouser beat the Chicago White Sox) and his first Shakespeare play in 1953 (Alec Guinness as Richard III at Ontario’s Stratford Festival) and has spent almost seventy-five years enjoying and writing about the pleasures of play that each provides. Shakespeare and Baseball is an unusual hybrid combining Crowl’s education as a Shakespeare and baseball fan, the resonances he perceives between the playwright and the game, the unexpected pleasures both forms of play have afforded his extended family of children and grandchildren, and a selection from the seventy letters he has written to them about Tigers games he has seen, from old Tiger Stadium, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and ballparks in Cleveland. Crowl finds unexpected connections between his twin subjects, including beer, which funded and fueled both the establishment of Major League baseball clubs, like the Yankees and Cardinals, and the creation of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, visited by Shakespeare enthusiasts from around the world. A deeper linkage is that Shakespeare’s festive comedies kept the ideas, rituals, and customs of rural England alive in the dense urban world of Elizabethan London, just as baseball kept the image of the garden—the rural American past in which the game took shape­—alive in the twentieth-century American city. The book is written in a style that captures what one reader has called Crowl’s “warm, rich midwestern voice” and will be of interest to fans of the game and of the Bard, from high schoolers on up.

In 2005, a group of actors in Kabul performed Shakespeare's Love’s Labour's Lost to the cheers of Afghan audiences and the raves of foreign journalists. For the first time in years, men and women had appeared onstage together. The future held no limits, the actors believed. In this fast-moving, fondly told and frequently very funny account, Qais Akbar Omar and Stephen Landrigan capture the triumphs and foibles of the actors as they extend their Afghan passion for poetry to Shakespeare's.Both authors were part of the production. Qais, a journalist, served as Assistant Director and interpreter for Paris actress, Corinne Jaber, who had come to Afghanistan on holiday and returned to direct the play. Stephen, himself a playwright, assembled a team of Afghan translators to fashion a script in Dari as poetic as Shakespeare's. This chronicle of optimism plays out against the heartbreak of knowing that things in Afghanistan have not turned out the way the actors expected.

For readers of Eula Biss and Cathy Park Hong, essays that knit cultural criticism, social history, and personal experience to excavate the entanglements of shame, power, language, and identity.

In Shamewreck, Peggy Shinner interrogates the entanglement of shame and language, casting shame as a moral force, a conscience-beast, an umpire, the fellow who awaits when you come home. She grapples with the nuclear bombing of Bikini Atoll and the emergence, four days later, of the bikini in Paris; the link between property and personhood and what it means to die without possessions; the mutability of language and how shamefaced once meant “modest and bashful,” before morphing into “abashed and ashamed”; how talkative women were thought to be sloppy women, like Eve (loose of mouth and morals ); how occupation once meant “heterosexual intercourse” and now means “military invasion.” Parsing the dark undercurrents of popular culture alongside her own experiences as a queer woman, Shinner exhorts us to abandon willful unseeing and consider the legacies of language. Take a look, she urges, you can buy a new car in twenty-first-century America and for your money get two masters and a slave key. Shamewreck complicates our notions of shame and shamelessness and rescues them from the refuse pile, reclaiming shame as a potent moral adjudicator.

As a young man, Finger reveled in the easy homosociality of his London polytechnical school, where he launched a student literary society in the mold of the city’s private men’s clubs. Throughout his life, as he wandered from England to Patagonia to the United States, he tried to recreate similarly open spaces—such as Gayeta, his would-be art colony in Arkansas. But it was through his idiosyncratic magazine All’s Well that he constructed his most successful social network, writing articles filled with coded signals and winking asides for an inner circle of understanding readers.

Capitalizing on the publishing opportunities of the day, Finger used every means available to express his twin loves—literature and men. He produced an enormous body of work, and his short, semiautobiographical fiction won some critical acclaim. Ultimately, the children’s book that won Finger a Newbery Medal ushered him into the public eye, ending his development as an author of serious queer literature.

Shared Secrets is both the story of Finger’s remarkable, adventurous life and a rare look at a community of gay writers and artists who helped shaped twentieth-century American culture, even as they artfully concealed their own identities.

At the age of fifty and faced with severe depression, Salomea Genin began to write about her family's history. From stories both told and untold, Genin recreates the lives of the Zwerling family in the Jewish quarter of Lvov: Shulim, her strict and deeply religious grandfather; his patient but tired wife Dvoire; and his beautiful, rebellious daughter Shayndl, who marries a dreamer against her father's wishes and without his blessing, and who will later become Salomea Genin's mother.

Genin's richly detailed portrait shows the effects of a family's struggle—personal, religious, social, and for their very survival—against the shadow of the Nazi rise to power.

Bobby Burns arrived in Tucson, Arizona, with a few dollars in his pocket and no place to live. Without family, without a job, he had nowhere to go but a homeless shelter. How did a college graduate find himself so close to life on the streets? In a voice that is startling for its simplicity and utter honesty, Burns tells the story of how he slipped into homelessness, how he learned what it means to live in a place where nobody will notice if you disappear, and how he emerged to tell his story. Bobby's diary of 41 days without a home brings readers into the world of a homeless shelter.

Shelter is filled with the sights and sounds of homelessness. Shelter life is patterned by meals provided by church volunteers, lines for soap and clean towels, the repeated meticulous washing of hands by an obsessive-compulsive resident, the rare pleasure of a fried chicken dinner, the illicit smell of marijuana within the shelter. Burns witnesses the residents' struggles with drugs, alcohol, and disability, and he wonders daily whether he will have the courage to emerge from this life. Bobby's diary expresses the full range of emotions of a homeless person: anger, self-pity, pride, humility, shame, depression, and optimism. These are not contradictions; taken together they represent the real feelings provoked by homelessness.

But with rare inner courage, Bobby stokes the fires of hope within himself, marking the days in his journal to keep himself from sliding deeper into a spiral of despair. Bobby confronts his own stereotypes about the homeless and learns firsthand what it means to struggle daily for survival and for dignity. He learns greater courage and he learns greater kindness. He is given food and a bed for 41 days, but he finds shelter on his own, deep within himself.

Upon moving to Appalachian Ohio with their two small children, Richard Gilbert and his wife are thrilled to learn there still are places in America that haven’t been homogenized. But their excitement over the region’s beauty and quirky character turns to culture shock as they try to put down roots far from their busy professional jobs in town. They struggle to rebuild a farmhouse, and Gilbert gets conned buying equipment and sheep—a ewe with an “outie” belly button turns out to be a neutered male, and mysterious illnesses plague the flock. Haunted by his father’s loss of his boyhood farm, Gilbert likewise struggles to earn money in agriculture. Finally an unlikely teacher shows him how to raise hardy sheep—a remarkable ewe named Freckles whose mothering ability epitomizes her species’ hidden beauty. Discovering as much about himself as he does these gentle animals, Gilbert becomes a seasoned agrarian and a respected livestock breeder. He makes peace with his romantic dream, his father, and himself. Shepherd, a story both personal and emblematic, captures the mythic pull and the practical difficulty of family scale sustainable farming.

Henry Warner Slocum, a Union major general who was a corps and army commander in the Civil War, served from the first call for troops until he stood with William Tecumseh Sherman to receive Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender after Appomattox. He saw action at Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, and by the end of the war he had taken command of the Army of Georgia, yet historians have largely overlooked this key commander.

            Brian Melton has written the first scholarly account of this important general—the first full-length biography in nearly a century—who as one of Sherman’s most trusted commanders exercised significant influence during the Civil War. Although Slocum is remembered primarily for his lackluster performance at Gettysburg, Melton discloses that there is more to him than current history credits, offering a holistic account of his life to show that his career was much more significant than has been supposed.

            Slocum took on the characteristics of the leaders he served, and Melton reveals how Slocum’s attitudes and tactics changed dramatically between commanders to explain why he proved to be of little help to George McClellan and almost a liability while serving under “Fighting Joe” Hooker and yet was an effective commander under Sherman. Slocum became Sherman’s “left arm” and adapted so thoroughly to his style of generalship that he anticipated the general’s intentions on two important occasions, and Melton contends that Slocum was a much more important contributor to the success of Sherman’s later campaigns than has been acknowledged, becoming at times more aggressive and driving than Sherman himself.

            Melton ultimately considers Slocum’s fate as one of the forgotten generals of the Civil War—brought on largely by his joining the Democratic Party in 1865—and demonstrates why previous simplistic depictions of Slocum miss the mark. By providing the first detailed look at this important second-tier commander, Sherman’s Forgotten General illuminates the influences, events, and individuals of Slocum’s career to show that, while he may not have changed the course of the war, he played a conspicuous and important role in its successful execution that has long deserved to be recognized.

Sherwood Anderson, an important American novelist and short-story writer of the early twentieth century, is probably best known for his novel Winesburg, Ohio. His realistic and nonformulaic writing style would influence the next generation of authors, most notably Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
    Walter Rideout’s Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America is a seminal work that reintroduces us to this important, yet recently neglected, American writer, giving him long overdue attention. This second volume of the monumental two-volume work covers Anderson’s life after his move in the mid-1920s to “Ripshin,” his house near Marion, Virginia (where Volume 1 ended.) The second volume covers his return to business pursuits; his extensive travels in the South touring factories, which resulted in his political involvement in labor struggles and several books on the topic; and finally his unexpected death in 1941.
    No other existing Anderson biography, the most recent of which was published nearly twenty years ago, is as thoroughly researched, so extensively based on primary sources and interviews with a range of Anderson’s friends and family members, or as complete in its vision of the man and the writer. Rideout uncovers much new information about events and people in Anderson’s life and provides a new perspective on many of his works. This two-volume biography presents Anderson’s many remarkable attributes more clearly than ever before, while astutely placing his life and writings in the broader social, political, and artistic movements of his times.


Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Winner, Biography Award, Society of Midland Authors

The life of a Mormon intellectual in the secular academic community is likely to include some contradictions between belief, scholarship, and the changing times. In his memoir, Armand L. Mauss recounts his personal and intellectual struggles—inside and outside the LDS world—from his childhood to his days as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1960s through his many years as a professor.

As an important and influential observer and author in the Mormon intellectual world, Mauss has witnessed how, in attempting to suppress independent and unsponsored scholarship during the final decades of the twentieth century, LDS leaders deliberately marginalized important intellectual support and resources that could have helped, in the twenty-first century, to refurbish the public image of the church. As a sociologist, he notes how the LDS Church, as a large, complex organization, strives to adjust its policies and practices in order to maintain an optimal balance between unique, appealing claims on the one hand and public acceptance on the other. He also discusses national and academic controversies over the New Religious Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Writing in clear language, Mauss shows how he has navigated the boundaries where his faith and academic life intersect, and reveals why a continuing commitment to the LDS Church must be a product of choice more than of natural or supernatural “proof.”
 

Ann Lewis's childhood was marked by an unusual rhythm. Each year the thawing and freezing of the Great Lakes signaled the beginning and end of the shipping season, months of waiting that were punctuated by brief trips to various ports to meet her father, the captain.

With lively storytelling and vivid details, Lewis captures the unusual life of shipping families whose days and weeks revolved around the shipping industry on the Great Lakes. She paints an intriguing and affectionate portrait of her father, a talented pianist whose summer job aboard an ore freighter led him to a life on the water. Working his way up from deckhand to ship captain, Willis Michler became the master of thirteen ships over a span of twenty-eight years. From the age of twelve, Ann accompanied the captain to the ports of Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, and Cleveland on the lower Great Lakes. She describes sailing through stormy weather and starry nights, visiting the engine room, dining at the captain's table, and wheeling the block-long ship with her father in the pilot house. Through her mother's stories and remarks, Lewis also reveals insights into the trials and rewards of being a ship captain's wife. The book is enhanced by the author's vintage snapshots, depicting this bygone lifestyle.

Janice Gary never walked alone without a dog - a big dog. Once, she was an adventurer, a girl who ran off to California with big dreams and hopes of leaving her past behind. But after a brutal rape, her youthful bravado vanished, replaced by a crippling need for safety. When she rescues a gangly Lab-Rottweiler pup,Gary is sure she’s found her biggest protector yet. But after Barney is attacked by a vicious dog, he becomes a clone of his attacker, trying to kill any dog that comes near him. Walking with Barney is impossible. Yet walking without him is unthinkable.
    After years of being exiled by her terror and Barney’s defensiveness, Janice risks taking her dog to a park near the Chesapeake Bay. There, she begins the messy, lurching process of walking into her greatest fears. As the leash of the past unravels, Barney sheds the defensive behaviors that once shackled him and Gary steps out of the self-imposed isolation that held her captive for three decades. Beautifully written, Short Leash is much more than a “dog story” or a book about recovering from trauma. It is a moving tale of love and loss, the journey of a broken soul finding itsway toward wholeness.

Shouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of his second novel, A Bad Man, in 1967 to his death in 1995, Elkin was tormented by the desire for both material and artistic success. Elkin's novels were taught in colleges and universities, his fiction received high praise from critics and reviewers (two of his novels won National Book Critics Circle Awards), and his short stories were widely anthologized--and yet he was unable to achieve renown beyond the avant-garde, or to escape the stigma of being an "academic writer." He wanted to be Faulkner, but he had trouble being Elkin. Drawing on personal interviews and an intimate knowledge of Elkins's life and works, David C. Dougherty captures Elkin's early life as the son of a charismatic, intimidating, and remarkably successful Jewish immigrant from Russia, as well as his later career at Washington University in St. Louis. A frequent participant at the annual Bread Loaf Writers' conference, he was the friend--and sometime antagonist--of other important writers, particularly Saul Bellow, William Gass, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Coover. Despite failed attempts to bridge the gap from his academic post to wide popular success, Elkin continued to write essays, stories, and novels that garnered unerring praise. His was a classic dilemma of an intellectual aesthete loath to make use of the common devices of popular appeal. The book details the ambition, the success, the friction, and the foibles of a writer who won fame, but not the fame he wanted.

A central figure in Illinois’ early history, Sidney Breese forged an eventful public life that spanned the state’s transition from a frontier territory to a modern industrial society. Joseph A. Ranney tells the story of the lasting achievements and far-reaching legal decisions that defined Breese’s career.

Born in New York, Breese moved to Illinois in 1818. An ambitious personality combined with acumen in law, politics, and business boosted Breese into the state’s frontier elite and involved him in the political controversies that roiled the Jacksonian Era. First a circuit court judge, Breese rose to the state Supreme Court before his election to the US Senate in 1842. Breese focused his senatorial energies on westward expansion and transforming the nation into a world power—ambitions symbolized by his pivotal role in the creation of the Illinois Central Railroad. After returning to the state Supreme Court, Breese ruled on essential cases that enshrined expansionist jurisprudence in American law and regulated the growing power of corporations in post–Civil War America.

A first full-length biography, Sidney Breese places the life of an overlooked figure within legal and Illinois history.

In the late 1820s a fiery young minister in western Ohio converted nearly 1,000 proselytes to the Reformed Baptist Movement. As these schismatics organized themselves into the new Disciples of Christ church, the Reverend Sidney Rigdon was already aligning himself with another, more radical movement, the Latter-day Saints, where he quickly became the LDS prophet’s principal advisor and spokesman. He served Joseph Smith loyally for the next fourteen years, even through a brief spat over the prophet’s romantic interest in his teenage daughter.

Next to Smith, Rigdon was the most influential early Mormon. He imported Reformed Baptist teachings into Latter-day Saint theology, wrote the canonized Lectures on Faith, championed communalism and isolationism, and delivered many of the most significant early sermons, including the famous Salt Sermon and the Ohio temple dedicatory address.

Following Smith’s death, Rigdon parted company with Brigham Young to lead his own group of some 500 secessionists Mormons in Pennsylvania. Rigdon’s following gradually dwindled, as the one-time orator took to wandering the streets, taunting indifferent passersby with God’s word. He was later recruited by another Mormon faction. Although he refused to meet with them, he agreed to be their prophet and send revelations by mail. Before long he had directed them to settle far-off Iowa and Manitoba, among other things. At his death, his followers numbered in the hundreds, and today they number about 10,000, mostly in Pennsylvania.

“Rigdon is a biographer’s dream,” writes Richard Van Wagoner. Intellectually gifted, manic-depressive, an eloquent orator and social innovator but a chronic indigent, Rigdon aspired to altruism but demanded advantage and deference. When he lost prominence, his early attainments were virtually written out of the historical record.

Correcting this void, Van Wagoner has woven the psychology of religious incontinence into the larger fabric of social history. In doing so, he reminds readers of the significance of this nearly-forgotten founding member of the LDS First Presidency. Nearly ten million members in over one hundred churches trace their heritage to Joseph Smith. Many are unaware of the importance of Rigdon’s contributions to their inherited theology.

The only child of deaf Puerto Rican immigrants, Andrés Torres grew up in New York City in a large, extended family that included several deaf aunts and uncles. In Signing in Puerto Rican: A Hearing Son and His Deaf Family, he opens a window into the little known culture of Deaf Latinos chasing the immigrant American dream. Like many children of deaf adults (codas), Torres loved his parents deeply but also longed to be free from being their interpreter to the hearing world. Torres’s story is unique in that his family communicated in three languages. The gatherings of his family reverberated with “deaf talk,” in sign, Spanish, and English. What might have struck outsiders as a strange chaos of gestures and mixed spoken languages was just normal for his family.

Torres describes his early life as one of conflicting influences in his search for identity. His parents’ deep involvement in the Puerto Rican Society for the Catholic Deaf led him to study for the priesthood. He later left the seminary as his own ambitions took hold. Torres became very active in the Puerto Rico independence party against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and protest against the Vietnam War. Throughout these defining events, Torres’s journey never took him too far from his Deaf Puerto Rican family roots and the passion of arms, hands, and fingers filling the air with simultaneous translation and understanding.

Like a number of Netherlanders in the post–World War II era, Inez Hollander only gradually became aware of her family’s connections with its Dutch colonial past, including a Creole great-grandmother. For the most part, such personal stories have been, if not entirely silenced, at least only whispered about in Holland, where society has remained uncomfortable with many aspects of the country’s relationship with its colonial empire.

Unlike the majority of memoirs that are soaked in nostalgia for tempo dulu, Hollander’s story sets out to come to grips with her family’s past by weaving together personal records with historical and literary accounts of the period. She seeks not merely to locate and preserve family memories, but also to test them against a more disinterested historical record. Hers is a complicated and sometimes painful personal journey of realization, unusually mindful of the ways in which past memories and present considerations can be intermingled when we seek to understand a difficult past. Silenced Voices is an important contribution to the literature on how Dutch society has dealt with its recent colonial history.

n 1968, Tommie Smith and his teammate John Carlos won the gold and silver medals, respectively, for the 200 meter dash.  Receiving their medals on the dais, they raised their fists and froze a moment in time that will forever be remembered as a powerful day of protest.  In this, his autobiography, Smith tells the story of that moment, and of his life before and after it, to explain what that moment meant to him. 

In Silent Gesture, Smith recounts his life before and after the 1968 Olympics: his life-long commitment to athletics, education, and human rights.  He dispels some of the myths surrounding his and Carlos' act on the dais -- contrary to legend, Smith wasn't a member of the Black Panthers, but a member of the US Olympic Project for Human Rights -- and describes in detail the planning and risks involved in his protest.  Smith also details his many years after Mexico City of devotion to human rights, athletics, and education.  A unique resource for anyone concerned with international sports, history, and the African American experience, Silent Gesture contributes a complete picture of one of the most famous moments in sports history, and of a man whose actions always matched his words.

Rendered in lovely, full-color illustrations, Silent Observer traces the early life of author Christy MacKinnon in Nova Scotia at the turn of the century. Born in 1889, the author lost her hearing from “the Winter fever” at the age of two. Her story tells of a simple, charming life on her family’s farm by the bay and in the schoolhouse where her father taught her in their hometown of Boisdale.

Silent Observer is an affectionate, poignant memoir of childhood as seen through the eyes of a vivacious young girl. Teachers, parents, and children will share in their enjoyment of this beautiful, sensitive story of a harder but wonderful time that has passed.

Recounts the remarkable life of a Prussian/Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States as a teenager in the 1850s and became one of the nation’s best-known physicians by the turn of the century

After medical study in South Carolina and Virginia on the eve of the Civil War, Simon Baruch served the Confederacy as a surgeon for three years, twice undergoing capture and internment. Despite economic hardships while practicing in South Carolina during Reconstruction, he helped to reactivate the State Medical Association and served as president of the State Board of Health. 

In 1881 he joined the exodus of southern physicians and scientists of that period, taking up residence in New York City, where he rose to prominence through his advocacy of surgery in one of the early operations for appendicitis and through is role as the protective physician in a widely publicized “child cruelty” case involving the musical prodigy, Josef Hofmann. Baruch became a leader in the nationwide movement to establish free public baths for tenement dwellers and in the development of expert medical journalism. Although his advocacy of such natural remedies as water, fresh air, and diet often made him appear unaccountably iconoclastic to his contemporaries, he has gained posthumous recognition as a pioneer in physical medicine.

Bernard N. Baruch, one of his four sons, has memorialized this work through endowments for research and instruction in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Ward reconstructs the life of a medical student in the South at the opening of the Civil War, the adventures of a Confederate surgeon, and the difficulties of a practitioner in Reconstruction South Carolina. Simon Baruch’s physician’s registers and his correspondence with colleagues afford the reader an immediate sense of the therapeutic dilemmas facing physicians and patients of his era. Baruch’s experiences while establishing himself in New York City after 1881 reflect the challenges facing those trying to break into what was then the nation’s medical capital—as well as that city’s rich opportunities and heady intellectual atmosphere. His energetic campaign for free public baths illustrates one of the most colorful chapters of American social history, as immigrants flooded the cities at the turn of the century. As medical editor of the New York Sun from 1912 to 1918, Baruch touched on most of the health concerns of that period and a few—such as handgun control—that persist to this day.

Simone de Beauvoir was a member of the intellectual elite of philosopher-writers whose feminist ideas revolutionised conventional thinking. She is known primarily for her monumental work: The Second Sex, (1949) a scholarly and passionate seminal work, which became a classic of feminist literature but also for her partnership with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, France's most celebrated and unconventional intellectual couplings.

In this collection of thoughtful essays, Jerry Apps reflects on the “simple things” that made up everyday life on the farm—an old cedar fencepost, Fanny the farm dog, the trusty tools used for farmwork, the kerosene lantern the family gathered around each morning and evening. As he holds each item up to the light for a closer look, he plumbs his memories for the deeper meanings of these objects, sharing the values instilled in him during his rural boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s. He concludes that people who had the opportunity to grow up on family farms gained useful skills, important knowledge, and lifelong values that serve them well throughout their lives. Apps captures and shares those things for people who remember them and those who never had the benefit of living on a small farm.
 

The texts available here in English for the first time open a window into the lives of three early modern Frenchwomen as they explore the common themes of family, memory, sin, and salvation. The Regrets of Marguerite d’Auge (1600), the Memoirs of Renée Burlamacchi (1623), and the Genealogy of Jeanne du Laurens (1631), taken from different genres of historical writings, raise important questions: Why and how did female authorship find its way into the historical record? How did these voices escape the censorship and prejudice against female publication? In a time of extreme religious conflict, how did these women convey their views on controversial issues such as primacy of grace, indulgences, and salvation without disrupting the gender expectations of the era?

Sinclair Lewis - American Writers 27 was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

After a troubled career as a student at Yale, Sinclair Lewis turned to literature as his livelihood, publishing numerous works of popular fiction that went unnoticed by critics. With the 1920s, however, came Main Street, Lewis’s first critical success, which was soon followed by Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth—five of the most influential social novels in the history of American letters, all written within one decade.

 

Nevertheless, Lewis’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 led to controversy. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and Thomas Mann expressed their dissent with the decision. Unable to match his previous success, Lewis suffered from alcoholism, alienated colleagues, and embraced unpopular political positions. The nadir for Lewis’s literary reputation was Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, which helped to legitimize the dismissal of Lewis’s entire body of work.

 

Recent scholarly research has seen a resurgence of interest in Lewis and his writings. The multiple and varied perspectives found in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, edited by Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer, illustrate uncompromised glimpses of a complicated writer who should not be forgotten. The more than 115 contributions to this volume include reminiscences by Upton Sinclair, Edna Ferber, Alfred Harcourt, Samuel Putnam, H. L. Mencken, John Hersey, Hallie Flanagan, and many others.

An extraordinary man, who advanced human knowledge on many fronts, Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) pursued dramatic adventure with scientific purpose. Jeannette Mirsky has drawn from Stein's voluminous outpouring of books and articles as well as from his letters and unpublished archival materials to produce a lively and definitive biography of this archaeological explorer, geographer, historical topographer, and linguist.

"[Mirsky] has digested the correspondence, and she quotes so skillfully that her book will save many people the trouble of reading Stein's own exhaustive and exhausting volumes. Definitive."—Larry McMurtry, Washington Post

"A first-rate and unique biography of one of the more significant explorers of Central Asia and the Indo-Iranian borderlands. . . . Mirsky has recreated not only the life of an intrepid explorer but the spirit of the times."—Choice

"Mirsky has performed a signal service in distilling the life, travels, and letters of Aurel Stein into a manageable, graceful, and meaningful synthesis."—Theodore A. Wertime, Technology and Culture

Sir Robert Borden was Plenipotentiary of Canada at the Peace Conference. With the Versailles Treaty ratified by the Canadian Parliament, Borden largely believed his work was done. He retired as Prime Minister in 1920. Although Borden died in 1937, the great legacy for Canada that derived from Borden's attitudes towards the role of the Dominions in international affairs was the drive towards a constitutional recognition of Canada's international position. Canada's control of its own foreign policy was finally confirmed in a declaration by Arthur Balfour in 1926 and the Statute of Westminster in 1931 that created the British Commonwealth of Nations. Borden helped to produce a Canada with an autonomous and independent foreign policy, the seeds of this work led to the growth of a vigorous foreign policy for Canada within a United Nations and its specialised agencies.