Results by title

In this brisk and riveting biography, Alex Beam takes readers on a journey through Wallace Stegner’s life and complicated legacy as one of the twentieth century’s best storytellers and chroniclers of the American West. 

In a career that spanned half a century, Stegner wrote fourteen novels and seventeen works of nonfiction. Reared on the Canadian-American frontier and educated in Salt Lake City, Utah, this quintessential Man of the West won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He landed a coveted teaching job at Harvard but, eager to get back to the West, left it for a professorship at Stanford.

Stegner was a full-throated environmentalist who served on the board of the Sierra Club, worked for the Secretary of the Interior, and wrote the famous Wilderness Letter on the healing power of open spaces. He founded Stanford University’s legendary Stegner Writing Fellowship, where his students included Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Sandra Day O'Connor, Tillie Olsen, and Scott Turow.

In his later years Stegner wondered if he had lived too deep into the wrong century. He left Stanford when he felt students no longer accorded professors the respect they deserved, and later became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that tarred his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose.

The definitive English-language biography of Sweden’s most celebrated novelist

Wild One details the captivating life of Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), the most celebrated Swedish novelist of her time and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Best known for her classic books The Saga of Gösta Berling and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Lagerlöf wrote dozens of acclaimed works and used her fame to advocate for women’s rights, humanitarian causes, and international peace. During her lifetime, however, even though she introduced Neo-Romanticism to Scandinavian literature, the male-dominated literary establishment strategically tried to downplay her as a modest spinster who reworked old stories and folktales from her rural Swedish province of Värmland.

Anna Nordlund and Jennifer Watson describe how, behind the old-fashioned public image placed on her, Lagerlöf was always on the front line, a forward-looking innovator whose writing is distinguished by inventive structures and a deep understanding of modern psychology. A savvy promoter of her own career, she utilized the new medium of radio, invested in the nascent Swedish film industry as adaptations of her novels became international sensations, and closely tracked translations of her work. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1909, Lagerlöf became even more vocal in her support for women’s rights and suffrage.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including private letters, Nordlund and Watson offer new insights into Lagerlöf’s remarkable personal life, including her passionate love for her frequent traveling companion, Sophie Elkan, and for fellow suffragette Valborg Olander. As Wild One makes clear, through her written works and social activism Lagerlöf embodied her own famous quotation: “I want to set the world in motion.”

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

During thirty years of literary collecting, Louis Daniel Brodsky has acquired some of the most important source materials on the life and work of William Faulkner anywhere available. Indeed, the Brodsky Collection, now owned by Southeast Missouri State University, has been characterized by Robert Penn Warren as "stupendous." In William Faulkner, Life Glimpses, Brodsky mines this storehouse of previously unpublished material, using interviews, letters, speeches, movie scripts, and notes to enrich our understanding of this well-known Southern writer. The result is a highly readable biography that is thematic and episodic rather than chronological in its organization.

Building on specific documents in the collection, Brodsky opens new windows on the parallel development of Faulkner's literary career and personal life. New material on the early poems ''Elder Watson in Heaven" and "Pregnancy" gives insight into Faulkner's developing literary and personal aesthetics during the 1920s and 1930s.

Faulkner's metamorphosis from self-doubting, isolated artist to confident public spokesman during the 1940s and 1950s forms the central core of the study. Through previously unavailable screenplays written for Warner Bros. during World War II and an interview with Faulkner's fellow screenwriter Albert I. "Buzz" Bezzerides, Brodsky charts the decline in Faulkner's literary output and his corresponding discovery of a public voice. He shows how Faulkner's astonishingly positive 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech was not a sudden about-face from the bleak outlook that had produced The Sound and the Fury. Rather, Faulkner's years in Hollywood showed him that words, even screenplays, could shape the way people think and react. Faulkner's lifelong quest for a "manly" role ended, Brodsky declares, when he took up the mantle of public spokesmanship.

In the final chapter, a revealing interview with Faulkner's granddaughter, Victoria Fielden Johnson, paints an insider's portrait of life at the Faulkner home, Rowan Oak. A copy of Faulkner's recipe for curing pork, included in the appendix, emphasizes his longterm struggle to produce fine literature while supplying the everyday needs of a large family.

These and other materials, previously unavailable to scholars and the reading public, will broaden and enrich our understanding of one of America's most celebrated writers.

William S. Burroughs's fiction and essays are legendary, but his influence on music's counterculture has been less well documented—until now. Examining how one of America's most controversial literary figures altered the destinies of many notable and varied musicians, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll reveals the transformations in music history that can be traced to Burroughs.

A heroin addict and a gay man, Burroughs rose to notoriety outside the conventional literary world; his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, was banned on the grounds of obscenity, but its nonlinear structure was just as daring as its content. Casey Rae brings to life Burroughs's parallel rise to fame among daring musicians of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, when it became a rite of passage to hang out with the author or to experiment with his cut-up techniques for producing revolutionary lyrics (as the Beatles and Radiohead did). Whether they tell of him exploring the occult with David Bowie, providing Lou Reed with gritty depictions of street life, or counseling Patti Smith about coping with fame, the stories of Burroughs's backstage impact will transform the way you see America's cultural revolution—and the way you hear its music.

From the Kansas outdoors to Oregon classrooms, William Stafford (1914–1993) led a vibrantly original life navigated with ambition and mission. In poetry crafted in everyday language, a conversational tone, and richly accessible introspection, he invited readers to question and explore nature, humanity, and the American West. After he won the National Book Award in poetry and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a role known today as US Poet Laureate), his talent became recognized around the world. The accolades and achievements continued, including Stafford later spending fifteen years as the Poet Laureate of Oregon. 

A character shaped by duty, adventure, a sharp sense of humor, and a strong moral compass, Stafford remains a beloved American poet. In William Stafford: The Shadow Poet, the first comprehensive biography, Steve Paul shares fascinating stories and frequently surprising accounts of Stafford’s life and work. The book traces Stafford from his humble origins through periods of social courage, the complications of his wartime alternative service, dedication to writing, and family tragedy. It explores how his pacifist world views and eco-consciousness continue to inspire those returning to his work or discovering it for the first time. Paul uncovers various layers of the poet’s life—through his philosophy, friends, family, teaching, and writing—and contemplates how Stafford’s metaphoric shadows, found frequently in his poems, figure into his life and career.

Winifred Sanford is generally regarded by critics as one of the best and most important early twentieth-century Texas women writers, despite publishing only a handful of short stories before slipping into relative obscurity. First championed by her mentor, H. L. Mencken, and published in his magazine, The American Mercury, many of Sanford’s stories were set during the Texas oil boom of the 1920s and 1930s and offer a unique perspective on life in the boomtowns during that period. Four of her stories were included in The Best American Short Stories of 1926.

Questioning the sudden end to Sanford’s writing career, Wiesepape, a leading literary historian of Texas women writers, delved into the author’s previously unexamined private papers and emerged with an insightful and revealing study that sheds light on both Sanford’s abbreviated career and the domestic lives of women at the time. The first in-depth account of Sanford’s life and work, Wiesepape’s biography discusses Sanford’s fiction through the lens of the sociohistorical contexts that shaped and inspired it. In addition, Wiesepape has included two previously unpublished stories as well as eighteen previously unpublished letters to Sanford from Mencken.

Winifred Sanford is an illuminating biography of one of the state’s unsung literary jewels and an important and much-needed addition to the often overlooked field of Texas women’s writing.

Women's playwriting burgeoned in the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Ever since, playwriting women have been embracing new subjects, experimenting with form, and devising new ways of looking at the world. To honor their achievements and inspire future endeavors, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize was established in memory of an American actor, journalist, and feminist who died of breast cancer. In the nearly three decades of the award's existence, more than three hundred English-speaking women playwrights have been finalists for the Blackburn Prize in recognition of their work, including such prominent writers as Marsha Norman, Cheryl L. West, Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of women's playwriting, as well as a celebration of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It combines critical essays, playwrights' memoirs, and conversations and interviews with playwrights to explore how women's playwriting evolved in relation to the women's movement and how it continues to map new territory and find fresh modes of expression. The majority of contributors to this volume—playwrights, arts journalists, and theater critics—have had some connection to the Blackburn Prize, either as award recipients, play readers, or judges. The memoirs, conversations, and interviews come from some of the finest women playwrights of the last three decades. These dramatists offer fascinating insight into the playwriting art, theatrical careers, and women's goals in writing for the theater.

This thoughtful, engaging collection examines resilience, identity, and inequality in the modern workplace produced by one of the nation's most observant and incisive writers. 

This collection of warm, heartfelt essays from award-winning novelist Vicki Covington chronicles the multitude of "in between" moments in the writer's life. These are her stolen moments in between the writing of four novels-Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women; in between coauthoring the edgy memoir Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage with her husband Dennis Covington; in between raising two daughters; in between her husband's struggle with cancer and the author's own heart attack; in between a life full of trials and triumphs, disappointments and celebrations - moments that, as Covington demonstrates here, are always rich and revealing. 

In the title essay, the author questions why all seven middle-class women who live on her street confess at a neighborhood cookout that in the past 48 hours each of them has cried. In "A Southern Thanksgiving," Covington reflects on the "family dance" that is Thanksgiving in the South: "In the North they put their crazy family members in institutions, but in the South we put them in the living room for everyone to enjoy." In "My Mother's Brain," the author recounts the onset of Alzheimer's in her mother and how, with the spread of the disease, an untapped vein of love is revealed. 

Some of these essays were written as weekly newspaper columns for the Birmingham News. Others were written for specific literary occasions, such as the First Annual Eudora Welty Symposium. They are divided into six thematic sections: "Girls and Women," "Neighborhood," "Death," "The South," "Spiritual Matters," and “Writing.”

Throughout, as Covington casts her candid, attentive eye on a situation, confusion yields to comprehension, fear flourishes into faith, and anger flows into understanding. In memorializing the small moments of her life, she finds that they are far from peripheral; indeed, they are central to a life full of value and meaning.

In Word Warrior, award-winning radio producer Sonja D. Williams draws on archives and hard-to-access family records, as well as interviews with family and colleagues like Studs Terkel and Toni Morrison, to illuminate Durham's astounding career. Durham paved the way for black journalists as a dramatist and a star investigative reporter and editor for the pioneering black newspapers the Chicago Defender and Muhammed Speaks. Talented and versatile, he also created the acclaimed radio series Destination Freedom and Here Comes Tomorrow and wrote for popular radio fare like The Lone Ranger. Incredibly, his energies extended still further--to community and labor organizing, advising Chicago mayoral hopeful Harold Washington, and mentoring generations of activists.

Incisive and in-depth, Word Warrior tells the story of a tireless champion of African American freedom, equality, and justice during an epoch that forever changed a nation.

Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.

In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post­–War avant-garde.