Joe Gould's Teeth
Joe Gould's Teeth

Author: Jill Lepore

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2016-05-17

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1101947594

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From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.” Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life’s work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. “I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people,” he explained, because “as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry.” By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould’s manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in “Joe Gould’s Secret,” a second profile, Mitchell claimed that “The Oral History of Our Time” had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould’s imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out. Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks—including volumes of his lost manuscript—Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists’ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould’s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

Joe Gould's Secret
Joe Gould's Secret

Author: Joseph Mitchell

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2016-01-26

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1504026616

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The story of a notorious New York eccentric and the journalist who chronicled his life: “A little masterpiece of observation and storytelling” (Ian McEwan). Joseph Mitchell was a cornerstone of the New Yorker staff for decades, but his prolific career was shattered by an extraordinary case of writer’s block. For the final thirty-two years of his life, Mitchell published nothing. And the key to his silence may lie in his last major work: the biography of a supposed Harvard grad turned Greenwich Village tramp named Joe Gould. Gould was, in Mitchell’s words, “an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to this city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years.” As Mitchell learns more about Gould’s epic Oral History—a reputedly nine-million-word collection of philosophizing, wanderings, and hearsay—he eventually uncovers a secret that adds even more intrigue to the already unusual story of the local legend. Originally written as two separate pieces (“Professor Sea Gull” in 1942 and then “Joe Gould’s Secret” twenty-two years later), this magnum opus captures Mitchell at his peak. As the reader comes to understand Gould’s secret, Mitchell’s words become all the more haunting. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joseph Mitchell including rare images from the author’s estate.

Joe Gould's Teeth
Joe Gould's Teeth

Author: Jill Lepore

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1101971797

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From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.” Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks—including volumes of his lost manuscript—Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists’ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould’s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

O Pioneers!
O Pioneers!

Author: Willa Cather

Publisher: Modernista

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9181080794

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When the young Swedish-descended Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's farm in Nebraska, she must transform the land from a wind-swept prairie landscape into a thriving enterprise. She dedicates herself completely to the land—at the cost of great sacrifices. O Pioneers! [1913] is Willa Cather's great masterpiece about American pioneers, where the land is as important a character as the people who cultivate it. WILLA CATHER [1873-1947] was an American author. After studying at the University of Nebraska, she worked as a teacher and journalist. Cather's novels often focus on settlers in the USA with a particular emphasis on female pioneers. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours, and in 1943, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Author: Tom Wolfe

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 142996118X

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Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New Journalism The phrase 'radical chic' was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. Radical Chic provocatively explores the relationship between Black rage and White guilt. Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, set in San Francisco at the Office of Economic Opportunity, details the corruption and dysfunction of the anti-poverty programs run at that time. Wolfe uncovers how much of the program's money failed to reach its intended recipients. Instead, hustlers gamed the system, causing the OEO efforts to fail the impoverished communities.

Pushing to the Front
Pushing to the Front

Author: Orison Swett Marden

Publisher:

Published: 1917

Total Pages: 650

ISBN-13:

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"The book tells how men and women have seized common occasions and made them great; it tells of those of average ability who have succeeded by the use of ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible purpose. It tells how poverty and hardship have rocked the cradle of the giants of the race. The book points out that most people do not utilize a large part of their effort because their mental attitude does not correspond with their endeavor, so that although working for one thing, they are really expecting something else; and it is what we expect that we tend to get."--Manybooks website

POOR WHITE
POOR WHITE

Author: Sherwood Anderson

Publisher: e-artnow

Published: 2017-10-06

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 802721842X

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Sherwood Anderson's Poor White captures the spirit of small-town America during the Machine Age. A lonely and passionate inventor of farm machinery, Hugh McVey, who rises from poverty on the bank of the Mississippi River, struggles to gain love and intimacy in a community where "life had surrendered to the machine." Through his story Anderson aims his criticism at the rise of technology and industry at the turn of the century. Simultaneously, he renders a tale of eloquent naturalism and disturbing beauty. Poor White was praised by such writers as H. L. Mencken and Hart Crane when it was first published in 1920. It remains a curiously contemporary novel, and a marvelous testament to Sherwood Anderson's "sombre metaphysical preoccupation and his smouldering sensuousness". Sherwood Anderson (1876 – 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Anderson published several short story collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. He may be most influential for his effect on the next generation of young writers, as he inspired William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe.