Susan Goodman

Blue Dusk

Carl Dawson

Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "the boss" of literary critics—his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities—Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others—William Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A Writer’s Life

William Dean Howells

ALL IN JUST ONE COOKIE A tasty picture book about what goes into Grandma's chocolate chip cookies.

All in Just One Cookie

Candace Waid

Clare Colquitt

This collection focuses on questions of biography, autobiography and aesthetics in Wharton's works, with particular attention to gender, race and class. The volume high-lights previously unpublished manuscripts and letters - notably, an unfinished short story in Italian and Wharton's correspondence with her niece Beatrix Farrand.

New Essays on Edith Wharton

A Forward Glance

Summer Secrets

Mary Austin (1868-1934)—eccentric, independent, and unstoppable—was twenty years old when her mother moved the family west. Austin's first look at her new home, glimpsed from California's Tejon Pass, reset the course of her life, "changed her horizons and marked the beginning of her understanding, not only about who she was, but where she needed to be." At a time when Frederick Jackson Turner had announced the closing of the frontier, Mary Austin became the voice of the American West. In 1903, she published her first book, The Land of Little Rain, a wholly original look at the West's desert and its ethnically diverse peoples. Defined in a sense by the places she lived, Austin also defined the places themselves, whether Bishop, in the Sierra Nevada, Carmel, with its itinerant community of western writers, or Santa Fe, where she lived the last ten years of her life. By the time of her death in 1934, Austin had published over thirty books and counted as friends the leading literary and artistic lights of her day. In this rich new biography, Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson explore Austin's life and achievement with unprecedented resonance, depth, and understanding. By focusing on one extraordinary woman's life, Mary Austin and the American West tells the larger story of the emerging importance of California and the Southwest to the American consciousness.

Mary Austin and the American West

Daniel Royot

Femmes de conscience, Aspects du féminisme américain (1848-1875) éclaire les débats qui animent la pensée américaine au XIXe siècle et préparent les grandes actions du XXe. Une équipe de spécialistes s'est réunie autour de Susan Goodman et Daniel Royot afin de mettre en perspective tout un faisceau d'idées. L'unité thématique s'est réalisée sur la condition des femmes et son évolution. Sont ainsi examinées les lignes de force des divers mouvements. L'approche diachronique permet d'évaluer le.

Susan Goodman

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