Book picks similar to
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s by Edmund Wilson
essays
non-fiction
library-of-america
literary-criticism
Shadow and Act
Ralph Ellison - 1964
His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem—“the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.” Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his formation as a writer as well as the genesis of Invisible Man.On every page, Ellison reveals his idiosyncratic and often contrarian brilliance, his insistence on refuting both black and white stereotypes of what an African American writer should say or be. The result is a book that continues to instruct, delight, and occasionally outrage readers.
A Dab of Dickens A Touch of Twain: Literary Lives from Shakespeare's Old England to Frost's New England
Elliot Engel - 2002
H. LAWRENCE • F. SCOTT FITZGERALD • ERNEST HEMINGWAY • ROBERT FROST They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown...until now! In this utterly captivating book, Dr. Elliot Engel, a foremost authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed men and women of literature's elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches A Dab of Dickens & A Touch of Twain reveals dozens of fascinating anecdotes: • Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle blamed his wife's death on Sherlock Holmes • How Charles Dickens' pet launched Edgar Allan Poe on his way to literary immortality • The strange connection between Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway • How Louisa May Alcott's attempt to get Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn banned backfired...and more! You'll never look at these literary giants the same way again.
Stories of Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell - 1953
Included here is Crown-Fire, Country Full of Swedes, The Windfall, Horse Thief, Yellow Girl and Kneel to the Rising Sun.
Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote
Truman Capote - 1995
Whether he was profiling the rich and famous or creating indelible word-pictures of events and places near and far, Capote's eye for detail and dazzling style made his reportage and commentary undeniable triumphs of the form. "Portraits and Observations" is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published by this most beloved of writers. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to meditations about fame, fortune, and the writer's art at the peak of his career, to the brief works penned during the isolated denouement of his life, these essays provide an essential window into mid-twentieth-century America as offered by one of its canniest observers. Included are such celebrated masterpieces of narrative nonfiction as "The Muses Are Heard" and the short nonfiction novel "Handcarved Coffins," as well as many long-out-of-print essays, including portraits of Isak Dinesen, Mae West, Marcel Duchamp, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe. Among the highlights are "Ghosts in Sunlight: The Filming of In Cold Blood, "Preface to Music for Chameleons, in which Capote candidly recounts the highs and lows of his long career, and a playful self-portrait in the form of an imaginary self-interview. The book concludes with the author's last written words, composed the day before his death in 1984, the recently discovered"Remembering Willa Cather," Capote's touching recollection of his encounter with the author when he was a young man at the dawn of his career. "Portraits and Observations" puts on display the full spectrum of Truman Capote's brilliance. Certainly, Capote was, as Somerset Maugham famously called him, "a stylist of the first quality." But as the pieces gathered here remind us, he was also an artist of remarkable substance.
Crime Stories and Other Writings
Dashiell Hammett - 2001
His stories opened up crime fiction to the realities of American streets and American speech. Now The Library of America collects the finest of them: 24 in all, along with some revealing essays and an early version of his novel The Thin Man. The texts, reprinted here for the first time, are those that appeared originally in the pulps, without the cuts and revisions introduced by later editors.Hammett's years of experience as a Pinkerton detective give even his most outlandishly plotted mysteries a gritty credibility. Mixing melodramatic panache and poker-faced comedy, his stories are hard-edged entertainment for an era of headlong change and extravagant violence, tracking the devious, nearly nihilistic exploits of con men and blackmailers, slumming socialites and deadpan assassins. As guide through this underworld he created the Continental Op, the nameless and deliberately unheroic detective separated from the brutality and corruption around him only by his professionalism.
The Adding Machine: Selected Essays
William S. Burroughs - 1985
Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous “cut-up” method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As a satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.
Later Novels: A Lost Lady / The Professor’s House / Death Comes for the Archbishop / Shadows on the Rock / Lucy Gayheart / Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Willa Cather - 1990
Their formal perfection and expansiveness of feeling are an expression of Cather’s dedication both to art and to the open spaces of America.A Lost Lady (1923) exemplifies her principle of conciseness. It concerns a woman of uncommon loveliness and grace who lends an aura of sophistication to a frontier town, and explores the hidden passions and desires that confine those who idealize her. The recurrent conflict in Cather’s work between frontier culture and an encroaching commercialism is nowhere more powerfully articulated.The Professor’s House (1925) encapsulates a story within a story. In the framing narrative, Professor St. Peter, a prizewinning historian of the early Spanish explorers, finds himself disillusioned with family, career, even the house that reflects his success. Within this story is another, of St. Peter’s friend Tom Outland, whose brief but adventurous life still shadows those he loved.Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) tells the story of the first bishop of New Mexico in a series of tableaux modeled on the medieval lives of the saints. Cather affectionately portrays the refined French Bishop Latour and his more earthy assistant within the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Southwest and among the Mexicans, Indians, and settlers they were sent to serve.Shadows on the Rock (1931), though its setting and subject are unusual for Cather, expresses her fascination with the “curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite.” It is a re-creation of 17th-century Québec as it appears to the apothecary Auclaire and his daughter Cécile: the town’s narrow streets, the supply ships on its great river, its merchants, profligates, explorers, missionaries, and towering personalities like Frontenac and Laval, all parts of a colony struggling to survive.Lucy Gayheart (1935) returns to the themes of Cather’s earlier writings, in a more somber key. Talented, spontaneous, and eager to explore the possibilities of life, Lucy leaves her prairie home to pursue a career in music. After a happy interval, her life takes an increasingly disastrous turn.Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) marks a triumphant conclusion to Cather’s career as a novelist. Set in Virginia five years before the Civil War, the story shows the effects of slaveholding on Sapphira Colbert, a woman of spirit and common sense who is frighteningly capricious in dealing with people she “owns,” and on her husband, who hates slavery even while he conforms to the social order that permits it. When through kindness he refuses to sell a slave, Sapphira’s jealous reaction precipitates a sequence of events that registers a conflict of cultural as well as personal values.
Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
Malcolm Cowley - 1951
Feeling alienated in the America of the 1920s, Fitzgerald, Crane, Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos, Cowley, and many other writers "escaped" to Europe, some forever, some as temporary exiles. As Cowley details in this intimate, anecdotal portrait, in renouncing traditional life and literature, they expanded the boundaries of art.
Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?: More Puzzles in Classic Fiction
John Sutherland - 1997
With bold imaginative speculation he investigates thirty-four literary conundrums, ranging from Daniel Defoe to Virginia Woolf. Covering issues well beyond the strict confines of Victorian fiction, Sutherland explores the questions readers often ask but critics rarely discuss: Why does Robinson Crusoe find only one footprint? How does Magwitch swim to shore with a great iron on his leg? Where does Fanny Hill keep her contraceptives? Whose side is Hawkeye on? And how does Clarissa Dalloway get home so quickly? As in its universally well received predecessor, the questions and answers in Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? are ingenious and convincing, and return the reader with new respect to the great novels they celebrate.
Novels and Stories
Zora Neale Hurston - 1995
Today her groundbreaking works, suffused with the culture and traditions of African-Americans and the poetry of black speech, have won her recognition as one of the most significant African-American writers. This volume, with its companion, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs & Other Writings brings together for the first time all of Hurston's best writings in one authoritative set. "Folklore is the arts of the people," Hurston wrote, "before they find out that there is any such thing as art."
Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
C.S. Lewis - 1966
S. Lewis's adult religious books, a repackaged edition of the revered author’s treasury of essays and stories which examine the value of creative writing and imaginative exploration.C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—presents a well-reasoned case for the importance of story and wonder, elements often ignored by critics of his time. He also discusses his favorite kinds of stories—children’s stories and fantasies—and offers insights into his most famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy.
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale
Eliot Weinberger - 2009
They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war.
Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time
Joseph Sobran - 1997
This text claims that the link between William Shakespeare and the works published under his name is weak, and it argues instead that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford and a literary Elizabethan courtier, is a far more plausible author than Shakespeare, the obscure country actor.
Poems and Translations
Ezra Pound - 2003
From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except "The Cantos." In addition to the famous poems that transformed modern literature, it features dozens of rare and out-of-print pieces, such as the handmade first collection "Hilda's Book" (1905-1907), late translations of Horace, rare sheet music translations, and works from a 1917 "lost" manuscript. Pound's influential "Cathay" (1915), "Lustra" (1917), and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)-as surely as his later masterly Confucian odes and Sophoclean dramas-followed the poet's own directive to "make it new," opening fresh formal pathways into ancient traditions. Through these works and others representing more than 30 different volumes and dozens of pieces that Pound never collected, "Poems and Translations" reveals the breadth of his daring invention and resonant music: lyrics echoing the Troubadors and Browning, chiseled 1920s free verse, and dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound's tumultuous life. Detailed endnotes of unprecedented range and depth clarify Pound's fascinatingly recondite allusions.
From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature
Richard Ruland - 1991
From Modernist/Postmodernist perspective, leading critics Richard Ruland (American) and Malcolm Bradbury (British) address questions of literary and cultural nationalism. They demonstrate that since the seventeenth century, American writing has reflected the political and historical climate of its time and helped define America's cultural and social parameters. Above all, they argue that American literature has always been essentially "modern," illustrating this with a broad range of texts: from Poe and Melville to Fitzgerald and Pound, to Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Thomas Pynchon.From Puritanism to Postmodernism pays homage to the luxuriance of American writing by tracing the creation of a national literature that retained its deep roots in European culture while striving to achieve cultural independence.