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This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily close, almost telepathic relationship. As Toby fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff does a masterful job of re-creating the frustrations and cruelties of adolescence. His various schemes - running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.
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The winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction writes a memoir that brings to life the stuff of boyhood--from paper routes to whiskey, fistfights to friendship and betrayal--and captures as well America in the fifties.
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• Introduction: Blackhawk's Land; Part I: Midwest Beginnings, 1876-1907;
• 1. A Town Springs Up;
• 2. Families in Fact and Fiction;
• 3. Society Girls;
• 4. Delphic Days;
• 5. The Genesis of Trifles;
• 6. Chicago; Part II. Susan and Jig, 1907-13;
• 7. A Greek Out of Time;
• 8. The Monist Society;
• 9. Letters to Mollie;
• 10. Travel at Home and Abroad;
• 11. "Though Stone Be Broken, ";
• 12. Staging Area for the Future; Interlude
• 1. Greenwich Village,
• 1913: The Joyous Season; Part III. The Provincetown Players;
• 13. A Home by the Sea;
• 14. War and Peace;
• 15. A Theatre on a Wharf.

• 16. Summer 1916, Two Playwright
• s17. A New Kind of Theatre;
• 18. Fire from Heaven on MacDougal Street;
• 19. "Here Pegasus Was Hitched, ";
• 20. Inheritors;
• 21. The Verge and Beyond;
• 22. The End of the Dream; Interlude
• 2. Delphi, 1922
• -24: The Road to the Temple; Part IV. Going On, 1924-48;
• 23. Picking Up the Pieces;
• 24. Novel Times;
• 25. Alison's House;
• 26. Break Up;
• 27. The Federal Theatre Project;
• 28. A Different War;
• 29. Completing the Circle; Notes; Bibliography; Acknowledgments; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; X; Y; Z; A photo gallery.

"Venturesome feminist, " historian Nancy Cott's term, perfectly describes playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), who explored uncharted regions and opened up new areas for women who followed. Born in Davenport, Iowa, just as America entered its second century, Glaspell took her cue from her pioneering grandparents as she sought to rekindle their spirit of adventure and purpose. A journalist by age eighteen, she worked her way through university as a news reporter and later became one of the leading novelists of the period. In 1913 she and her husband, fellow Davenport iconoclast George Cram "Jig" Cook, joined the migration of writers from the Midwest to Greenwich Village, where they established the first American avant-garde. Glaspell became co-founder of many of its important institutions--the Provincetown Players, the Liberal Club, Heterodoxy--and a close friend of John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill. She and O'Neill wrote the plays that launched modern American drama, hers addressing such pressing topics as suffrage, birth control, female sexuality, marriage equality, socialism, and pacifism. Although frail and ethereal, Glaspell was a determined rebel throughout her life, scandalizing staid Davenport when at age thirty-five she began an affair with then-married Jig. She lived a year in Paris, spent two in Delphi with Jig, and after his death began an eight-year affair with a man seventeen years her junior. Youthful in appearance, she remained youthful in her approach to life. "Out there--lies all that's not been touched--lies life that waits, " Claire Archer says in The Verge, Glaspell's most experimental play. The biography of Susan Glaspell is the exciting story of her personal exploration of the same terrain.
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• 1. From depression to war
• 2. Ethiopia, lift your dark-night face
• 3. Americans in Spain
• 4. Munich on Broadway
• 5. The war of words
• 6. The people's culture
• 7. Across the Pacific
• 8. The Axis conquest of Europe and responsible liberalism I
• 9. The Axis conquest of Europe and responsible liberalism II.
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Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, pre-eminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Neibuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it. The variety of competing answers offered a rich legacy of idioms, symbols, and standard arguments that were destined to license America's promotion of its values and interests around the world for the rest of the twentieth century. Ambitious in scope and addressing an enormous range of writers, thinkers, and artists, this book is the first to establish the outlines of American culture during this pivotal period.
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• Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1929-1934; 1934-1939; 1939-1944; Manuscript poems; Chronologies; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z.

The correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate, extending from 1929 to the time of Bishop's death in 1944, embraces the period of the Great Depression and the coming of World War II. In that richly eventful period in the development of American literature, these two men of letters were continually exchanging news and comment about the activities, opinions, successes, and misadventures of poets, novelists, critics, publishers, and editors; about expatriate Americans in Europe and the quickening intellectual life of New York; and about the Agrarian movement and what was later to be called the Southern Renascence. Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter, Maxwell Perkins, Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Scott Fitzgerald-all are subjects of comment, both personal and artistic. The respect and affection of both writers for Edmund Wilson survived their vehement political differences with him, and their exchange of literary criticism, advice, and encouragement with Wilson continued unabated. The letters record a warm and steady friendship, as well as a literary relationship in which Tate-though the younger man-is clearly the mentor. The freedom with which Tate and Bishop discuss their work in progress, and the care and candor with which they comment on one another's poems and stories, offer the reader of this carefully edited correspondence revealing glimpses of the creative process and the reality of the American "republic of letters" in their time.
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• Editor's Foreword; Advisers and Contributors; Introduction; A-Z Entries; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z; Appendix: Literary Prizes.

This is a unique new reference book to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world - from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. The survivors of the Victorian age who feature in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English - writers such as Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Rabindranath Tagore, Henry James - could hardly have imagined how richly diverse `Literature in English' would become by the end of the century. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are celebrated in this informative, readable, and catholic reference book, which includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors. All the great literary figures are included, whether American or Australian, British, Irish, or Indian, African or Canadian or Caribbean - among them Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Patrick White, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, D. H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Wole Soyinka, Sylvia Plath - as well as a wealth of less obviously canonical writers, from Anais Nin to L. M. Montgomery, Bob Dylan to Terry Pratchett. The book comes right up to date with contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Carol Shields, Tim Winton, Nadine Gordimer, Vikram Seth, Don Delillo, and many others. Title entries range from Aaron's Rod to The Zoo Story; topics from Angry Young Men, Bestsellers, and Concrete Poetry to Soap Opera, Vietnam Writing, and Westerns. A lively introduction by John Sutherland highlights the various and sometimes contradictory canons that have emerged over the century, and the increasingly international sources of writing in English which the Companion records. Catering for all literary tastes, this is the most comprehensive single-volume guide to modern (and postmodern) literature.
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Writing and the writer's life as seen by twelve prominent-and decidedly opinionated-practitioners of the art. Norman Mailer once told Lawrence Grobel that writers may be an endangered species. And Saul Bellow said, "The country has changed so, that what I do no longer signifies anything, as it did when I was young." But to judge from this collection, writers and writing aren't done for quite yet. Sometimes serious, sometimes funny, sometimes caustic, always passionate, the twelve writers in Endangered Species memorably state their case for what they do and how they do it. And they even offer an opinion or two about other writers and about the entire publishing food chain: from agents to publishers to booksellers to critics.
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This book peeks inside the writerly testing grounds of Sue Grafton, Kim Stafford, Maureen Stanton, and others. This collection of essays by well-established professional writers explores how their notebooks serve as their studios and workshops - places to collect, to play, and to make new discoveries with language, passions, and curiosities. For these diverse writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice, whether crafting fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Some entries include sample journal entries that have since developed into published pieces. Through their individual approaches to keeping a notebook, the contributors offer valuable advice, personal recollections, and a hardy endorsement of the value of using notebooks to document, develop, and nurture a writer's creative spark. Designed for writers of all genres and all levels of experience, "Writers and Their Notebooks" celebrates the notebook as a vital tool in a writer's personal and literary life.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)