Croswell Bowen


Book Description

Croswell Bowen: A WriterÆs Life, a DaughterÆs Portrait is the life story of a journalist who wrote his way through the major events of the mid-twentieth century. While tracing the trajectory of Croswell BowenÆs (1905û71) personal life, his daughter, Betsy Connor Bowen, follows the path left by her father as he wrote about the Wall Street crash of 1929, the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam War. A riveting account of the life and times of an American journalist, Connor BowenÆs biography of Bowen is a daughterÆs quest to find her father through his work at the intersections of journalism, democracy, and liberalism. BowenÆs life and work were shaped by his conviction that finding the right stories and telling them with the right words could create a better world. He wrote about criminals, poverty, illness, discrimination, and other matters of social injustice. While writing to advance causes he believed in and lending a voice to the less fortunate, he struggled to maintain his marriage and provide for his family. Although he made mistakes in both his professional and personal life, Bowen celebrates his ability, even in failure, to maintain bold moral integrity.




Abraham Oakey Hall


Book Description




The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill


Book Description

Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2018 The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill offers a new comprehensive overview of O'Neill's career and plays in the context of the American theatre. Organised thematically, it considers his modernist intervention in the theatre, offers readers detailed analysis of the plays, and assesses the recent resurgence in his reputation and new approaches to staging his work. It includes a study of all his major plays-The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Desire Under the Elms-besides numerous other full length and one act dramas. Eugene O'Neill is generally credited with inventing modern American drama, in a time of cultural ferment and lively artistic and intellectual change. Yet O'Neill's theatrical instincts were always shaped by American stage traditions that were inextricable from his sense of himself and his own national culture. This study shows that his theatrical modernism represents not so much a break from these traditions as a reinvention of their scope and significance in the context of international stage modernism, offering an image of national culture and character that opens new possibilities for the stage while remaining rooted in its past. Kurt Eisen traces O'Neill's modernism throughout the dramatists's work: his attempts to break from the themes, plots, and moral conventions of the traditional melodramatic theatre; his experiments in stagecraft and theme, and their connection to traditional theatre and his European modernist contemporaries; the turn toward direct and indirect self-representation; and his critique of the family and of American 'pipe dreams' and the allure of success. The volume additionally features four contributed essays providing further critical perspectives on O'Neill's work, alongside a chronology of the writer's life and times.




Another Part of a Long Story


Book Description

"An engrossing biography about the marital breakdown of a major literary figure, of particular interest for what it reveals about O'Neill's creative process, activities, and bohemian lifestyle at the time of his early successes and some of his most interesting experimental work. In addition, King's discussion of Boulton's efforts as a writer of pulp fiction in the early part of the 20th century reveals an interesting side of popular fiction writing at that time, and gives insight into the lifestyle of the liberated woman." ---Stephen Wilmer, Trinity College, Dublin Biographers of American playwright Eugene O'Neill have been quick to label his marriage to actress Carlotta Monterey as the defining relationship of his illustrious career. But in doing so, they overlook the woman whom Monterey replaced---Agnes Boulton, O'Neill's wife of over a decade and mother to two of his children. O'Neill and Boulton were wed in 1918---a time when she was a successful pulp novelist and he was still a little-known writer of one-act plays. During the decade of their marriage, he gained fame as a Broadway dramatist who rejected commercial compromise, while she mapped that contentious territory known as the literary marriage. His writing reflected her, and hers reflected him, as they tried to realize progressive ideas about what a marriage should be. But after O'Neill left the marriage, he and new love Carlotta Monterey worked diligently to put Boulton out of sight and mind---and most O'Neill biographers have been quick to follow suit. William Davies King has brought Agnes Boulton to light again, providing new perspectives on America's foremost dramatist, the dynamics of a literary marriage, and the story of a woman struggling to define herself in the early twentieth century. King shows how the configuration of O'Neill and Boulton's marriage helps unlock many of O'Neill's plays. Drawing on more than sixty of Boulton's published and unpublished writings, including her 1958 memoir, Part of a Long Story, and an extensive correspondence, King rescues Boulton from literary oblivion while offering the most radical revisionary reading of the work of Eugene O'Neill in a generation. William Davies King is Professor of Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of several books, most recently Collections of Nothing, chosen by Amazon.com as one of the Best Books of 2008. Illustration: Eugene O'Neill, Shane O'Neill, and Agnes Boulton ca. 1923. Eugene O'Neill Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.




Hidden History of Columbia County, New York


Book Description

Bordered by the Hudson River and the Berkshire Mountains, Columbia County is part of the famously picturesque Hudson Valley region. But look beyond the rolling hills to discover the secrets of Columbia County. A mastodon tooth rolled down a farmer's hill in Claverack, changing the world's understanding of prehistoric times. President Martin Van Buren lost his wife, Hannah, in Kinderhook and hardly mentioned her again. Hudson's gallows were the scene of New York's last hanging, as hundreds of ticketholders looked on. Outcasts called "Pondshiners" hid in the hills of Taghkanic, and the only sign of their existence are the fantastic baskets they made. Join local author Allison Guertin Marchese as she explores these little-known stories of people and places, deeply woven into the history of Columbia County, New York.




Contour in Time


Book Description

This study attempts to trace Eugene O'Neill's theatrical contour from its origin to its end, by discussing each of his works in the approximate chronological order of composition. The book is thus a form of biography, although it pays no heed to those events of O'Neill's life that did not have direct bearing on his professional career. By virtue of O'Neill's central position in the drama of the modern world, this study also has become, within the limits its subject sets for it, a form of theatrical history. An appendix contains a complete factual record of important productions of O'Neill's plays. ISBN 0-19-504548-3 (pbk.): $12.95.




Rich


Book Description

As Americans, we have been taught to be obsessed with money and the people who have it. We are curious about what they buy, where they vacation, and what separates them from the rest of us. Rich puts the American obsession with all things money into much-needed perspective and context, exposing the origins of the upper class. The book traces the history of the American rich from 1920 up to today, examining the who, what, when, where, and why of the wealthy elite. With its hundreds of compelling, real-life stories, Rich offers a fascinating window into this world few ever see. Samuel delves into the secrets about the rich and famous: Who were the Gateses, Bransons, and Trumps (and even Paris Hiltons) of the past? How did the rich show off their status? What did they splurge on and how did they scrimp when times got tough? Rich also explores the rise of the first mass affluent class in America and the virtual demise of old money as we knew it. Enlightening and often surprising, Rich gives us a deeper understanding of our country's wealthiest and most enigmatic class.




A Mask for Privilege


Book Description

Why in America should the most sinister of European social diseases have taken root? Why should that disease have spread from its seemingly anachronistic beginning in the Gilded Age until it infected many of our great magazines and newspapers? Until it determined not only where a man might stay the night, but where he got his education and how he earned his living? This book answers such questions by exposing the myths with which the anti-Semite surrounds his position. By taking away the "mask of privilege" it reveals the source of such prejudice for what it is--the determination of the forces of special privilege, with their hangers-on, to maintain their select and exclusive status regardless of the consequences to other human beings. Like Carey McWilliams's other books on minorities in America, 'A Mask for Privilege' reveals the facts of discrimination so that the fogs of prejudice may be dispersed by the truth. It traces the growth of discrimination and persecution in America from 1877 to 1947, shows why Jews are such good scapegoats, and contrasts the Jewish stereotype--"too pushing, too cunning" with that of other minority groups. Then it looks at the anti-Semitic personality and concludes, with Sartre, that here is "a man who is afraid"--of himself. In his stirring new introduction, Wilson Carey McWilliams calls this a work of recovery "evoking names and moods and incidents now either half-forgotten or lost to memory." This brilliant analysis of anti-Semitism is a documented and forceful attempt to inform Americans about the danger of the undemocratic, antisocial practices in their midst, and to suggest a positive program to arrest a course too similar to that which led to the Holocaust. It transcends majority-minority relations and becomes an analysis of antidemocratic practices, which affect the whole fabric of American life.




Croswell Bowen


Book Description

Croswell Bowen: A Writer's Life, a Daughter's Portrait is the life story of a journalist who wrote his way through the major events of the mid-twentieth century. While tracing the trajectory of Croswell Bowen's (1905-71) personal life, his daughter, Betsy Connor Bowen, follows the path left by her father as he wrote about the Wall Street crash of 1929, the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam War. A riveting account of the life and times of an American journalist, Connor Bowen's biography of Bowen is a daughter's quest to find her father through his work at the intersections of journalism, democracy, and liberalism. Bowen's life and work were shaped by his conviction that finding the right stories and telling them with the right words could create a better world. He wrote about criminals, poverty, illness, discrimination, and other matters of social injustice. While writing to advance causes he believed in and lending a voice to the less fortunate, he struggled to maintain his marriage and provide for his family. Although he made mistakes in both his professional and personal life, Bowen celebrates his ability, even in failure, to maintain bold moral integrity.




They Stole Him Out of Jail


Book Description

“Reminds readers that the history of lynching and racial violence in the United States is not a closed book, but an ever-relevant story.” —Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury. In They Stole Him Out of Jail, William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the “Greenville notebook” kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. Gravely meticulously recreates the case’s details, analyzing the flaws in the investigation and prosecution that led in part to the acquittals. Vivid portraits emerge of key figures in the story, including both Earle and Brown, Solicitor Robert T. Ashmore, Governor Strom Thurmond, and West, whose article “Opera in Greenville” is masterful journalism but marred by errors owing to her short stay in the area. Gravely also probes problems with memory that resulted in varying interpretations of Willie Earle’s character and conflicting narratives about the lynching itself.