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The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War

Hazel Hutchison

In this provocative study, the author takes a fresh look at the roles of American writers in helping to shape national opinion and policy during the First World War. From the War's opening salvos in ... More

In this provocative study, the author takes a fresh look at the roles of American writers in helping to shape national opinion and policy during the First World War. From the War's opening salvos in Europe, American writers recognized the impact the War would have on their society and sought out new strategies to express their horror, support, or resignation. By focusing on the writings of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Grace Fallow Norton, Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos, the author examines what it means to be a writer in wartime, particularly in the midst of a conflict characterized by censorship and propaganda. Drawing on original letters and manuscripts, some never before seen by researchers, this book explores how the essays, poetry, and novels of these seven literary figures influenced America's public view of events, from August 1914 through the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and ultimately set the literary agenda for later, more celebrated texts about the War.Less

A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays of Irving Howe

Irving Howe

Nina Howe (ed.)

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example ... More

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six pieces of work that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society. This book aims to help with the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe's voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics—a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.Less

Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art

Judith L. Sensibar

This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his life—his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, ... More

This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his life—his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and the childhood friend who became his wife, Estelle Oldham. In this new exploration of Faulkner's creative process, the text discovers that these women's relationships with Faulkner were not simply close; they gave life to his imagination. The book brings to the foreground, as Faulkner did, this “female world,” an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography. Through extensive research in untapped biographical sources, including archival materials and interviews with the women's families and other members of the communities in which they lived, the book reconnects Faulkner's biography to his work. It demonstrates how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships with women. The book alters and enriches our understanding not only of Faulkner, his art, and the complex world of the American South that came to life in his brilliant fiction, but also of darknesses, fears, and unspokens that Faulkner unveiled in the American psyche.Less

The Cross and Other Jewish Stories

Lamed Shapiro

Leah Garrett (ed.)

Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948) was the author of groundbreaking and controversial short stories, novellas, and essays. Himself a tragic figure, Shapiro led a life marked by frequent ocean crossing, ... More

Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948) was the author of groundbreaking and controversial short stories, novellas, and essays. Himself a tragic figure, Shapiro led a life marked by frequent ocean crossing, alcoholism, and failed ventures, yet his writings are models of precision, psychological insight, and daring. Shapiro focuses intently on the nature of violence: the mob violence of pogroms committed against Jews; the traumatic after-effects of rape, murder, and powerlessness; and, the murderous event that transforms the innocent child into witness and the rabbi's son into agitator. Within a society on the move, Shapiro's refugees from the shtetl and the traditional way of life are in desperate search of food, shelter, love, and things of beauty. Remarkably, and against all odds, they sometimes find what they are looking for. More often than not, the climax of their lives is an experience of ineffable terror. This book also reveals Lamed Shapiro as an American master. His writings depict the Old World struggling with the New, extremes of human behaviour combined with the pursuit of normal happiness. Through the perceptions of a remarkable gallery of men, women, children—even of animals and plants—Shapiro successfully reclaimed the lost world of the shtetl as he negotiated East Broadway and the Bronx, Union Square, and vaudeville.Less