Alan Gordon

Lois G. Gordon

All the news, radio, television, movie, popular and classical music, theater, art, dance, literary, science and technology, sports, and fashion highlights of every year from 1920 to 1980 are recorded. Facts and figures, headlines, quotas, ads, fads, firsts, and anecdotes-- as well as more than 250 photographs--supplement the listings.

Six Decades in American Life, 1920-1980

American Chronicle

Lois Gordon

Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot was one of the most influential works for the post-World War II generation, has long been identified with the debilitated and impotent characters he created. In this provocative book, Lois Gordon offers a new perspective on Beckett, challenging the prevalent image of him as reclusive, self-absorbed, and disturbed. Gordon investigates the first forty years of Beckett's life and finds that he was, on the contrary, a kind and generous man who responded sensitively and even heroically to the world around him. Gordon describes the various places and events that affected Beckett during this formative period: war-torn Dublin during the Easter Uprising and World War I, where he spent his childhood and student days; Belfast and Paris in the 1920s and London during the Depression, where he lived and worked; Germany in 1937, where he traveled and witnessed Hitler's brutal domestic policies; prewar and occupied France, where he was active in the Resistance (for which he was later decorated); and the war-ravaged town of Saint-L� in Normandy, which he helped to restore following the liberation. Gordon also portrays the individuals who were important to Beckett, including Jack B. Yeats, Alfred P�ron, Thomas McGreevy, and, most significantly, James Joyce, who was a model for Beckett personally, artistically, and politically. Gordon argues convincingly that Beckett was very much aware of the political and cultural turmoil of this period and that the enormously creative works he wrote after World War II can, in fact, be viewed as a product of and testament to those tumultuous times.

The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946

Professor Lois Gordon

Looks at the life of Nancy Cunard, a writer and activist who gave up a fantasy life to fight a lifelong battle against social injustice.

Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist

Nancy Cunard

Sketches Barthelme's life, discusses his writing style, analyzes the major novels and short stories, and assesses his place in modern literature

Donald Barthelme

With works ranging thematically and stylis­tically from The Universal Baseball Association to The Public Burning, from Pricksongs and Descants to Spanking the Maid, Robert Coover emerges as one of the most vibrant writers from a remarkable avant-garde that in the mid­-1960s mounted serious assault on traditional ideas of form and content in world literature. Lois Gordon here defines Coover's novels, short stories, and plays in terms of his con­temporaries: among Americans, Donald Bar­thelme, William Gass, John Hawkes, and others; among Europeans, Julio Cortazar, Robert Pinget, and Italo Calvino, to name a few. These writers dismiss the conventions of traditional form—linear plot, character development, definable theme, Aristotle's unities of time and space—as no longer ap­propriate in the modern world. Coover writes in a dazzling variety of forms and styles; in each he demonstrates a diversity of the style and manipulates the trappings of every conventional form—from Old Comedy to theater of the absurd. He also translates or transposes techniques associated with other art forms, such as film montage or operatic interlude. In Coover's hands, any of these forms are fair game for parody. Gordon notes: “Coover's method, more specifically is this: at the same time that he maintains a strong narrative line he coun­terpoints it (his musical term is 'descants') with numerous mythic, legendary, or sym­bolic levels… which serve to explode any final meaning or resting point.” Nothing is static—personality, event, human values. Coover writes about a continual flux in which everything is constantly qualified and dramatically altered. He portrays the public and private rituals that man construes “to barter inner and outer disorder.”

Lois G. Gordon

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