Christoph Irmscher

Cooper C. Graham

In 1919, Florence Deshon—tall, radical, and charismatic—was well on her way to becoming one of Hollywood's brightest stars. Embroiled in a clandestine affair with Charlie Chaplin, she continued to remain romantically involved with the well-known writer and socialist Max Eastman. By 1922, she was found dead in a New York apartment, rumored to have committed suicide. Love and Loss in Hollywood: Florence Deshon, Max Eastman, and Charlie Chaplin uses previously unpublished letters between Deshon and Eastman to reconstruct their relationship against the backdrop of the "golden age" of Hollywood. Deshon's tragic life and her abuse at the hands of powerful men—including Chaplin, Eastman, and Samuel Goldwyn—resonate with the concerns of today's MeToo movement. Above all, though, this is a book about an extraordinary woman unjustly forgotten: a brilliant writer and campaigner for women's rights, driven both by her ambition to succeed and a boundless desire for life. Rich in tantalizing detail, Love and Loss in Hollywood chronicles crucial years of American film history, overshadowed by the pervasive fear of Bolshevism after World War I, the Red Riots, and the emergence of the big studios in Hollywood. This beautiful edition features dozens of unpublished photographs, among them six mesmerizing full-length portraits of Deshon by Adolph de Meyer, Vogue's first fashion photographer.

Florence Deshon, Max Eastman, and Charlie Chaplin

Love and Loss in Hollywood

Newly expanded and in full color, this groundbreaking book argues that early American natural historians had a distinctly poetic sensibility, producing work that had a visionary intensity. Covering naturalists from John James Audubon to PT Barnum, it considers not only natural history writing, but also illustrations, photographs, and actual collections of flora and fauna. Photography and all associated expenses made possible by a generous grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

The Poetics of Natural History

“This book is not just about a man of science but also about a scientific culture in the making—warts and all.” —The New York Times Book Review Charismatic and controversial Swiss immigrant Louis Agassiz took America by storm in the early nineteenth century, becoming a defining force in American science. Yet today, many don’t know the complex story behind this revolutionary figure. At a young age, Agassiz—zoologist, glaciologist, and paleontologist—was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Boston, and he never left. An obsessive pioneer in field research, Agassiz enlisted the American public in a vast campaign to send him natural specimens, dead or alive, for his ingeniously conceived museum of comparative zoology. As an educator of enduring impact, he trained a generation of American scientists and science teachers, men and women alike—and entered into collaboration with his brilliant wife, Elizabeth, a science writer in her own right and first president of Radcliffe College. But there was a dark side to his reputation as well. Biographer Christoph Irmscher reveals unflinching evidence of Agassiz’s racist impulses and shows how avidly Americans at the time looked to men of science to mediate race policy. He also explores Agassiz’s stubborn resistance to evolution, his battles with a student—renowned naturalist Henry James Clark—and how he became a source of endless bemusement for Charles Darwin and esteemed botanist Asa Gray. “A wonderful . . . biography,” both inspiring and cautionary, it is for anyone interested in the history of American ideas (The Christian Science Monitor). “A model of what a talented and erudite literary scholar can do with a scientific subject.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Creator of American Science

Louis Agassiz

literarische Selbststilisierung bei T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens und William Carlos Williams

Masken der Moderne

Robert Arbour

Ten essays provide a new approach to the work of the most popular American poet of all time. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow’s work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Many of the essays rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reconsidering Longfellow

Charles Adams

The Arkansas Regulators is a rousing tale of frontier adventure, first published in German in 1846, but virtually lost to English readers for well over a century. Written in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, but offering a much darker and more violent image of the American frontier, this was the first novel produced by Friedrich Gerstäcker, who would go on to become one of Germany’s most famous and prolific authors. A crucial piece of a nineteenth-century transatlantic literary tradition, this long-awaited translation and scholarly edition of the novel offers a startling revision of the frontier myth from a European perspective.

The Arkansas Regulators

The definitive biography of a radical activist and intellectual Max Eastman (1883–1969) was a prolific writer, radical, and public intellectual who helped shape the twentieth century. While researching this masterful work, acclaimed biographer Christoph Irmscher was granted unprecedented access to the Eastman family archive, allowing him to document little-known aspects of the famously handsome and charismatic radical. Considered one of the “hottest radicals” of his time, Eastman edited two of the most important modernist magazines, The Masses and The Liberator, and campaigned for women’s suffrage and world peace. A fierce critic of Joseph Stalin, Eastman befriended and translated Leon Trotsky and remained unafraid to express unpopular views, drawing criticism from both conservatives and the Left. Set against the backdrop of several decades of political and ideological turmoil, and interweaving Eastman’s singular life with stories of the fascinating people he knew and loved, this book will have broad interdisciplinary appeal in twentieth-century history and politics, intellectual history, and literary studies.

A Life

Max Eastman

This work presents a portrait of Longfellow as an author, friend and family man. The most popular American poet of his day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was a mulitculturalist before the term was invented. He believed in the value of foreign travel and conceived of American literature as 'transatlantic'.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200

Public Poet, Private Man

Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram’s botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale’s museum to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as “halls of humbug.” Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America’s rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook’s forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon’s masterful portraits of American birds. In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James. This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.

Traces the life of the nineteenth-century scientist who discovered how glaciers form, describing how he enlisted the American public to collect natural specimens for his museum, his work training a generation of scientists, and his staunchly racist views.

Christoph Irmscher

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