Traces the life of the American journalist, screenwriter, and wit, describes her relationships with the other members of the Algonquin Round Table, and attempts to portray her complex personality

Offers advice on where to stay, where to eat, and what to see, including Pikes Peak, the U.S. Mint, Coors Field, the Rodeo Hall of Fame, and historic Gold Rush towns

Best-selling novelist Toni Morrison has published five major works: Beloved (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988), Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. In this provocative study of Morrison's novels, Trudier Harris blends fictive and folkloric approaches to illuminate the depth and complexity of the African-American literary heritage.Morrison stands in a long line of black writers who have grounded their characters, themes, and structures in African-American folk traditions.  Typically, students of such grounding have proceeded in two steps—first identifying items of folklore and locating them in previous collections, then interpreting how the items function in the literary text.  Thus critics have viewed folklore as merely grafted onto the "real" literature.  While Morrison joins her literary predecessors in drawing on folk materials, her "literary" folklore restructures and adapts traditional patterns so creatively that scholars now must reconceptualize the relationship between folklore and literature.Harris identifies Morrison's primary folkloric strategy as reversal—a process that creates an alternative universe where the antithetical is the norm and the incredible is taken for granted.  Thus Morrison succeeds in creating worlds where the line between history and fiction, legend and fact, is permanently blurred.  Furthermore, in replicating the processes of folk culture, Morrison encourages readers to participate in the creative process itself.The Author:  Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English and Chair of the Curriculum in African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (view table of contents)

May Sarton has been writing and publishing poetry for over sixty years. A House of Gathering gives her poetry long-overdue critical attention and discusses Sarton's place among modern and contemporary world authors. As working poets, the contributors offer knowledgeable discussions of Sarton's craft. The essays cover a broad range of topics, from Pastan's memoirs of Sarton as her teacher at Radcliffe in the 1950s, to Charlotte Mandel's close scrutiny of Sarton's poetic forms in her earliest collections, to Bobby Caudle Rogers's consideration of the poetic sequence as a form in contemporary American poetry, to Keith Norris's reading of Sarton as a postmodernist. William Stafford's essay on Sarton's A Private Mythology offers eloquent testimony as to the poet's "breakthrough" in mid-career. In addition, A House of Gathering includes an original interview with May Sarton; a recent poem, "Friendship and Illness"; working drafts for "Old Lovers at the Ballet"; a letter from Sarton to H.D.; and several original photographs. These essays will appeal to readers interested in poetry and literature in general, in women's studies, and in May Sarton.

Popular and academic sources analyze the performer's developing career and her influence on popular culture (view table of contents)

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Popular and academic sources analyze the performer's developing career and her influence on popular culture (view table of contents)

Delves beneath the surface to examine the forces that made Sontag an international icon, exploring her public persona and private passions, including the strategies behind her meteoric rise to fame and her political moves and missteps. 12,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

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The Western Experience offers a thorough, analytical overview of Western civilization, giving students an introduction to the major achievements in Western thought, art, and science as well as the social, political, and economic context for understanding those developments. To demonstrate the connected nature of all histories, these various aspects of history are examined in an integrated way. To help readers develop their reasoning and writing skills, each chapter is constructed to serve as an example of a historical essay: A historical problem is presented and arguments are developed using historical evidence. The ninth edition features many improvements, including the work of Lisa Tiersten in her new chapter on Nineteenth Century Empires. .

Product Description: The Heart of RevolutionThe Radical Life and Novels of Olive DarganKathy Cantley AckermanDespite the timeless themes of Olive Tilford Dargan’s work and the acclaim she earned with her novels Call Home the Heart (1932) and A Stone Came Rolling (1935), the author, who published her best-known works under the pseudonym Fielding Burke, has been largely forgotten by the American literary establishment...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: You'll never fall into the tourist traps when you travel with Frommer's. It's like having a friend show you around, taking you to the places locals like best. Our expert authors have already gone everywhere you might go--they've done the legwork for you, and they're not afraid to tell it like it is, saving you time and money...read more

Inventing Black Women fills important gaps in our understanding of how African American women poets have resisted those conventional notions of gender and race that limit the visibility of Black female subjects. The first historical and thematic survey of African American women's poetry, this book examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women over the nearly 125 years since the end of slavery and Reconstruction, as it offers incisive readings of individual works by important poets such as Alice B. Neal, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and many others.Ajuan Maria Mance establishes that the history of African American women's poetry revolves around the struggle of the Black female poet against two marginalizing forces: the widespread association of womanhood with the figure of the middle-class, white female; and the similar association of Blackness with the figure of the African American male. In so doing, she looks closely at the major trends in Black women's poetry during each of four critical moments in African American literary history: the post- Reconstruction era from 1877 to 1910; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the Black Arts Movement from 1965 to 1975; and the late twentieth century from 1975 to 2000.

Product Description: In Triangular Road, famed novelist Paule Marshall tells the story of her years as a fledgling young writer in the 1960s. A memoir of self-discovery, it also offers an affectionate tribute to the inimitable Langston Hughes, who entered Marshall's life during a crucial phase and introduced her to the world of European letters during a whirlwind tour of the continent...read more