"An intimate biography of legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century-including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath"-- "Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century-including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath-finally gets her due in this intimate biography.When twenty-five-year-old...

Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, Rachel Gordan examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity. Positive depictions of Jews in popular literature had a normalizing effect, while at the same time forging the notion of Judaism as an American religion distinct from Christianity but part of America's alleged 'Judeo-Christian' heritage.

Covers American authors from many periods and genres, building a broad understanding of the various contexts - from the biographical to the literary to the historical - in which literature can be viewed.

"Ear Training gathers thirty essays and reviews by one of America's most playful critics. Known for his long career as a professor and writer of critical biographies, for this collection William H. Pritchard has selected some of his favorite shorter pieces on a wide range of topics. United by Pritchard's philosophy of literature, which he calls "ear training", pieces on subjects from John Updike to Emily Dickinson to Frank Sinatra to the soap opera...

"To be a Black writer in the early years of the Cold War was to face a stark predicament. On the one hand, revolutionary Communism promised egalitarianism and lit the sparks of anticolonial struggle, but was hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand, the great force opposing the Soviets at midcentury was itself the very fountainhead of racial prejudice, represented in the United States by Jim Crow. Jesse McCarthy argues that Black...

Presents stories, sermons, reminiscences, poetry, recipes and color reproductions of African-American fine art, for celebrating the Christmas and Kwanzaa season.

"Richard Wright's dramatic imagination guided the creation of his masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy and helped shape Wright's long-overlooked writing for theater and other performative mediums. Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright's family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright's oeuvre--from his 1930s boxing journalism to his unpublished one-acts on returning Black GIs in WWII to...

After World War I, American, Irish and then Caribbean writers boldly remade the world literary system long dominated by Paris and London. Responding to literary renaissances and social upheavals in their own countries and to the decline of war-devastated Europe, émigré and domestic-based writers produced dazzling new works that challenged London's or Paris's authority to fix and determine literary value. In so doing, they propounded new conceptions...