Best of
Americana

1979

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor


Flannery O'Connor - 1979
    . . There she stands, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word."—Sally Fitzgerald, from the Introduction

Suttree


Cormac McCarthy - 1979
    He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals and the poverty-stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humour enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity.

Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians


Peter Guralnick - 1979
    In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these legendary performers, Peter Guralnick captures the boundless passion that drove these men to music-making and that kept them determinedly, and sometimes almost desperately, on the road.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volumes A & B


Judith Tanka - 1979
    From trickster tales of the Native American tradition to bestsellers of early women writers to postmodernism, this edition conveys the diversity of American literature from its origins to the present. Volume 2 covers the period of 1865 to the present.

Fools Crow


Thomas E. Mails - 1979
    A disciplined, gentle man who upheld the old ways, he was aggrieved by the social ills he saw besetting his own people and forthright in denouncing them. When he died in 1989 at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, he was widely loved and respected. Fools Crow is based on interviews conducted in the 1970s. The holy man tells Thomas E. Mails about his eventful life, from early reservation days when the Sioux were learning to farm, to later times when alcoholism, the cash economy, and World War II were fast eroding the old customs. He describes his vision quests and his becoming a medicine man. His spiritual life—the Yuwipi and sweatlodge ceremonies, the Sun Dance, and instances of physical healing—is related in memorable detail. And because Fools Crow lived joyfully in this world, he also recounts his travels abroad and with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, his happy marriages, his movie work, and his tribal leadership. He lived long enough to mediate between the U.S. government and Indian activists at Wounded Knee in 1973 and to plead before a congressional subcommittee for the return of the Black Hills to his people.

Letters on an Elk Hunt by a Woman Homesteader


Elinore Pruitt Stewart - 1979
    Stewart is far less concerned with elk hunting than with people—old friends and new acquaintances—and with the land in which she found so much beauty. Her letters, as Jessamyn West said of the earlier volume, "are, in fact (though not that alone), a collection of short stories." She added that "what makes these letters so good are not these stories, but the character of the storyteller, of Elinore Stewart herself. Her letters endure and give pleasure because she does what the great letter-writers do: she reveals herself. . . . It is the woman in this vanished landscape, the homesteader with her enormous vitality, humor, and tenderness who holds our attention." Jessamyn West's wish to know more about the author herself is fulfilled in the foreword to Letters on an Elk Hunt—an appreciative biographical sketch, incorporating material from some of Mrs. Stewart's unpublished letters as well as the reminiscences of her children.Elizabeth Fuller Ferris, of the Wilderness Women Project, Missoula, Montana, is the writer and producer of Burntfork, a film for public television funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities based upon the life of Elinore Pruitt Stewart.

Confederates


Thomas Keneally - 1979
    By the acclaimed author of the Academy Award-winning movie Schindler's List, this Civil War saga is both a riveting account of America at war and a tapestry of human drama.

Selected Poems


Richard Hugo - 1979
    The result easily demonstrated, then as now, the massive achievement of the writer whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living."

Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time


Lillian Hellman - 1979
    

What My Heart Wants to Tell


Verna Mae Slone - 1979
    So He sent us His very strongest men and women." So begins the heartwarming story of Verna Mae and her father, Isom B. "Kitteneye" Slone, an extraordinary personal family history set in the hills around Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky.

The Political Culture of the American Whigs


Daniel Walker Howe - 1979
    He shows that the Whigs were not just a temporary coalition of politicians but spokesmen for a heritage of political culture received from Anglo-American tradition and passed on, with adaptations, to the Whigs' Republican successors. He relates this culture to both the country's economic conditions and its ethnoreligious composition.

Anonymous Was a Woman: A Celebration in Words and Images of Traditional American Art and the Women Who Made It


Mirra Bank - 1979
    Filled with beautiful four-color reproductions of samplers, quilts, paintings, and needle-pictures along with excerpts from diaries and letters, sampler verse, books, and magazines of the period, Anonymous Was a Woman celebrates the daily experiences and inner lives of women who, in acts of love and duty, created many masterpieces of American folk art.

The Book of Bebb


Frederick Buechner - 1979
    Pulitzer Prize finalist Frederick Buechner's quartet of outrageously witty, inspirational Bebb novels in one volume.

The Frigates


Henry Gruppe - 1979
    Navy during the 19th century, along with the men who sailed them, and the battles in which they participated.

Seven Complete Perry Mason Novels - The Case Of: The Foot-Loose Doll / The Glamorous Ghost / The Long-Legged Models / The Lucky Loser, The Screaming Woman / The Terrified Typist / The Waylaid Wolf


Erle Stanley Gardner - 1979
    Seven complete Perry Mason novels

Back Roads of Oregon


Earl Thollander - 1979
    82 Trips on Oregon's Scenic Byways

The California Missions (Sunset Pictorial)


Dorothy Krell - 1979
    Never before have both the history and present-day beauty of the missions been so completely and magnificently portrayed. All twenty-one missions are shown in attractive watercolor renderings, and there are intriguing photographs from early days as well as recent times. Each mission is the subject of an individual chapter in which its meaning and contribution to our history are fully explained. A valuable reference source for the whole family, this handsome book doubles as a visitor's guide. Providing information on mission tours, museums, and libraries.

A Better Guide Than Reason: Federalists & Anti-Federalists


M.E. Bradford - 1979
    E. Bradford defines the Old Whig political tradition in American thought, showing that the inheritance of the prescriptive anti-federalists still lives. For Bradford, important elements in our heritage from the American Revolution have been systematically hidden from our view by anachronistic and partisan scholarship. He believes that other, more ideological components have been emphasized at the expense of the rest. Here he attempts to return us to our heritage.A Better Guide than Reason is a unique book due to its unusual focus on the Declaration of Independence. Bradford shows that neither equality of condition nor full equality of individual rights for every inhabitant is foreseen by that document, only constitutional equality. For this reason, many scholars have seen a contradiction between the Declaration of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787. Bradford believes that the American Revolution was fought against concentrated power, and asserts that the Declaration is violated whenever such powers are granted in its name.Russell Kirk, in a poignant new introduction, depicts Bradford as "a formidable and learned champion of the permanent things in our patrimony of culture and politics." He discusses Bradford's view that Patrick Henry and John Dickinson were the real heroes of the American Revolutionary period. This volume is of continuing interest to historians, political scientists, and American studies scholars. Professor Jeffrey Hart has called the book "a masterful phenomenology of the American and Western Spirit."

The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1979
    The smilers --Myra meets his family --Two for a cent --Dice, brassknuckles & guitar --Diamond Dick and the first law of woman --The third casket --The pusher-in-the-face --One of my oldest friends --THe unspeakable egg --John Jackson's arcady --Not in the guidebook --Presumption --The adolescent marriage --Your way and mine --The love boat --The bowl --At your age --Indecision --Flight and pursuit --On your own --Between three and four --A change of class --Six of one --A freeze-out --Diagnosis --The rubber check --On schedule --More than just a house --I got shoes --The family bus --In the darkest hour --No flowers --New types --Her last case --Lo, the poor peacock! --The intimate strangers --Zone of accident --Fate in her hands --Image on the heart --Too cute for words --Inside the house --Three acts of music --"Trouble" --An author's mother --The end of hate --In the holidays --The guest in room nineteen --Discard [Director's special] --On an ocean wave --The woman from twenty-one.

Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America's Great Department Stores


Robert Hendrickson - 1979
    Book by Robert Hendrickson