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Bret Harte
Bret Harte was the best-known and highest paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst’s biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role. Harte’s pioneering use of California local color in such stories as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open eastern papers to contributions by Mark Twain and others. The popularity of Bret Harte’s writings was driven largely by a literary market that his western stories helped create. The first Harte biography in nearly seventy years to be written entirely from primary sources, this book documents Harte’s personal relationships and, in addition, his negotiations with various publishers, agents, and theatrical producers as he exploited popular interest in the American West.
Bret Harte
The prototype of the modern man of letters as a man of business, Harte epitomized the professional writer in America immediately after the Civil War. Nor was his career short-lived. His collected writings run to twenty-five volumes, and his tales were regularly translated into German, French, Italian, Swedish, Russian, and other languages. Part I of this volume lists first printings and many reprintings and translations of nearly 850 of Harte's poems, stories, and plays. It reconstructs his lecture tours and the performance schedules of several plays and lists texts falsely attributed to him. Part II lists a number of documentary sources, many of them new to Harte scholarship, including interviews, a selection of Harte obituaries, and archives that hold Harte manuscripts.
Mark Twain
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Kate Field
Kate Field was among the first celebrity journalists. A literary and cultural sensation, she reported the news while frequently becoming news herself because of her sharp wit and vibrant presence. She wrote for several prestigious newspapers, such as the Boston Post, Chicago Tribune, and New York Herald, as well her own Kate Field’s Washington. Field’s friends and professional acquaintances included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. Legendary novelist Henry James patterned the character of Henrietta Stackpole after her in The Portrait of a Lady. In this eloquent and immensely readable biography, Gary Scharnhorst offers a fas...
Lives Out of Letters
Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, artention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's In This Our World and Uncollected Poems
Prominent American author, lecturer, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is best known for her 1898 treatise Women and Economics, which ascribed gender inequality to women’s economic dependence upon men, and for her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," which depicts a woman’s descent into madness. However, she began her career as a poet. Her first authored book, a collection of verse entitled In This Our World, was issued in four different editions between 1893 and 1898. While virtually all of Gilman’s later poems appeared in her monthly magazine, The Forerunner (1909–16), or in The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996), Gilman’s early verse has been largely inaccessible to modern readers, and dozens of her poems have never been collected. This volume, coedited by Scharnhorst and Knight, includes all 149 poems in the 1898 edition of In This Our World as well as 112 vagrant poems that appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines. This critical volume features a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes. Gilman devotees and a new generation of readers will find this edition an indispensable resource.
The World of Benjamin Cardozo
As one of America's most influential judges, first on New York State's Court of Appeals and then on the U.S. Supreme Court, Cardozo oversaw legal transformation daily. How he arrived at his rulings, with their far-reaching consequences, becomes clear in this book, the first to explore the connections between Cardozo's life and his jurisprudence.
The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr
Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches juvenile novels of poor boys parlaying "luck and pluck'' into "fame and fortune"' did much to shape and popularize the American success myth. This is a biography of the intensely private man. Ousted from a Unitarian pulpit in Brewster, Massachusetts, in 1866 for sodomizing young boys, Alger spent the final half of his life obscuring his past, and ordered all personal papers burned after his death in 1899. In 1927, the essential Alger was further obscured when Herbert Mayes published a fabricated biography based on a nonexistent diary which "exposed'' Alger as a lecher who wrote to fund his travels in pursuit of a married woman.
Sitting in Darkness
Perhaps the most popular of all canonical American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored Twain’s work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu examines Twain’s career-long archive of writings about United States relations with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain’s early writings about Chinese immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery and anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain’s ideas about race were not limited to white and black, but profoun...
Julian Hawthorne
Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity. What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other...
