American Novelists Since World War II.


Book Description

Contains biographical sketches of writers who either began writing novels after 1945 or have done their most important work since then.




The South and America Since World War II


Book Description

In this sweeping narrative, Cobb covers such diverse topics as "Dixiecrats," the "southern strategy," the South's domination of today's GOP, immigration, the national ascendance of southern culture and music, and the roles of women and an increasingly visible gay population in contemporary southern life. Beginning with the early stages of the civil rights struggle, Cobb discusses how the attack on Pearl Harbor set the stage for the demise of Jim Crow. He examines the NAACP's postwar assault on the South's racial system, the famous bus boycott in Montgomery, the emergence of Rev. Martin Luther King in the movement, and the dramatic protests and confrontations that finally brought profound racial changes, and two-party politics to the South.




The Undergraduate's Companion to American Writers and Their Web Sites


Book Description

An outstanding research guide for undergraduate students of American literature, this best-selling book is essential when it comes to researching American authors. Bracken and Hinman identify and describe the best and most current sources, both in print and online, for nearly 300 American writers whose works are included in the most frequently used literary anthologies. Students will know exactly what information is available and where to find it.




King of the Jews


Book Description

New in Paperback This 1979 classic tells the darkly humorous story of I.C. Trumpelman, a man whose fancy determines the fate of others. Chosen as the head of a Judenrat, Trumpelman thrives on the power granted him and creates an authoritarian regime of his own within the ghetto. By turns a con man, charismatic leader and merciless dictator, Trumpelman reveals himself as an extraordinarily complex protagonist. Now available in a new paperback edition from Handsel Books, King of the Jews will continue to be an extraordinary vision of occupied Poland, and offer stunning insight through the trappings of history to questions of equal moral complexity today. "Mature, brilliantly sustained, thoroughly engrossing." -Newsweek "The best book yet to be written on the Holocaust. A superb novel." -San Francisco Chronicle "Remarkable. A lesson in what artistic restraint can do to help us imagine the dark places in our history." -The New York Times Book Review "Profoundly daring...Epstein can summon up life from the bottom of despair." -The Boston Globe "Epstein has done the impossible. He has shown what the power of art--of his art—can reveal of the depths of the unspeakable." -The Philadelphia Inquirer




The Postwar African American Novel


Book Description

Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. In this book, Stephanie Brown recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. She also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright's Native Son (1940) is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African-American literature. And Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. But readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby's historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby's case, "costume dramas." Their status as "lesser lights" is the product of retrospective bias, Brown demonstrates, and their novels established the period immediately following World War II as a pivotal moment in the history of the African American novel.




The Violent American Century


Book Description

“Tells how America, since the end of World War II, has turned away from its ideals and goodness to become a match setting the world on fire” (Seymour Hersh, investigative journalist and national security correspondent). World War II marked the apogee of industrialized “total war.” Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastation was catastrophic almost everywhere, with the notable exception of the United States, which exited the strife unmatched in power and influence. The death toll of fighting forces plus civilians worldwide was staggering. The Violent American Century addresses the US-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945—beginning with brutal localized hostilities, proxy wars, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War, and ending with the asymmetrical conflicts of the present day. The military playbook now meshes brute force with a focus on non-state terrorism, counterinsurgency, clandestine operations, a vast web of overseas American military bases, and—most touted of all—a revolutionary new era of computerized “precision” warfare. In contrast to World War II, postwar death and destruction has been comparatively small. By any other measure, it has been appalling—and shows no sign of abating. The author, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, draws heavily on hard data and internal US planning and pronouncements in this concise analysis of war and terror in our time. In doing so, he places US policy and practice firmly within the broader context of global mayhem, havoc, and slaughter since World War II—always with bottom-line attentiveness to the human costs of this legacy of unceasing violence. “Dower delivers a convincing blow to publisher Henry Luce’s benign ‘American Century’ thesis.” —Publishers Weekly




American Foreign Policy Since World War II


Book Description

The Gold Standard for Textbooks on American Foreign Policy American Foreign Policy Since World War II provides you with an understanding of America’s current challenges by exploring its historical experience as the world’s predominant power since World War II. Through this process of historical reflection and insight, you become better equipped to place the current problems of the nation’s foreign policy agenda into modern policy context. With each new edition, authors Steven W. Hook and John Spanier find that new developments in foreign policy conform to their overarching theme—there is an American “style” of foreign policy imbued with a distinct sense of national exceptionalism. This Twenty-First Edition continues to explore America’s unique national style with chapters that address the aftershocks of the Arab Spring and the revival of power politics. Additionally, an entirely new chapter devoted to the current administration discusses the implications of a changing American policy under the Trump presidency.




Three Great Novels of World War II


Book Description

A trio of classic bestselling novels that unforgettably capture the experience of American fighting men in World War II -- and have captured the hearts and minds of generations of readers.




American Higher Education Since World War II


Book Description

A masterful history of the postwar transformation of American higher education In the decades after World War II, as government and social support surged and enrollments exploded, the role of colleges and universities in American society changed dramatically. Roger Geiger provides an in-depth history of this remarkable transformation, taking readers from the GI Bill and the postwar expansion of higher education to the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, desegregation and coeducation, and the ascendancy of the modern research university. He demonstrates how growth has been the defining feature of modern higher education, but how each generation since the war has pursued it for different reasons. Sweeping in scope and richly insightful, this groundbreaking book provides the context we need to understand the complex issues facing our colleges and universities today, from rising inequality and skyrocketing costs to deficiencies in student preparedness and lax educational standards.




Eminent Outlaws


Book Description

This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.




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