A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years. Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives. Now the editors have curated the Book Review’s dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage and photography, this beautiful book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges. Here are the first takes on novels we now consider masterpieces, including a long-forgotten pan of Anne of Green Gables and a rave of Mrs. Dalloway, along with reviews and essays by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, and more. With scores of stunning vintage photographs, many of them sourced from the Times’s own archive, readers will discover how literary tastes have shifted through the years—and how the Book Review’s coverage has shaped so much of what we read today.
Nicholas Fox Weber, author of the acclaimed Patron Saints (“Exhilarating avant-garde entertainment”—Sam Hunter, The New York Times Book Review) and Balthus (“The authoritative account of his life and work”—Michael Ravitch, Newsday), gives us now the idiosyncratic lives of Sterling and Stephen Clark—two of America’s greatest art collectors, heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and for decades enemies of each other. He tells the story, as well, of the two generations that preceded theirs, giving us an intimate portrait of one of the least known of America’s richest families. He begins with Edward Clark—the brothers’ grandfather, who amassed the Clark fortune in the late-nineteenth century—a man with nerves of steel; a Sunday school teacher who became the business partner of the wild inventor and genius Isaac Merritt Singer. And, by the turn of the twentieth century, was the major stockholder of the Singer Manufacturing Company. We follow Edward’s rise as a real estate wizard making headlines in 1880 when he commissioned Manhattan’s first luxury apartment building. The house was called “Clark’s Folly”; today it’s known as the Dakota. We see Clark’s son—Alfred—enigmatic and famously reclusive; at thirty-eight he inherited $50 million and became one of the country’s richest men. An image of propriety—good husband, father of four—in Europe, he led a secret homosexual life. Alfred was a man with a passion for art and charity, which he passed on to his four sons, in particular Sterling and Stephen Clark. Sterling, the second-oldest, buccaneering and controversial, loved impressionism, created his own museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts—and shocked his family by marrying an actress from the Comédie Française. Together the Sterling Clarks collected thousands of paintings and bred racehorses. In a highly public case, Sterling sued his three brothers over issues of inheritance, and then never spoke to them again. He was one of the central figures linked to a bizarre and little-known attempted coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. We are told what really happened and why—and who in American politics was implicated but never prosecuted. Sterling’s brother—Stephen—self-effacing and responsible—became chairman and president of the Museum of Modern Art and gave that institution its first painting, Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad. Thirteen years later, in an act that provoked intense controversy, Stephen dismissed the Museum’s visionary founding director, Alfred Barr, who for more than a decade had single-handedly established the collection and exhibition programs that determined how the art of the twentieth century was regarded. Stephen gave or bequeathed to museums many of the paintings that today are still their greatest attractions. With authority, insight, and a flair for evoking time and place, Weber examines the depths of the brothers’ passions, the vehemence of their lifelong feud, the great art they acquired, and the profound and lasting impact they had on artistic vision in America.
This work provides access to approximately 5,000 reviews of English-language mathematical books published in North America. Included are works on mathematics, science, philosophy, and education appearing in the periodical literature from 1800 to 1940. It covers materials not reviewed in Book Review Index and Book Review Digest. It predates Mathematical Reviews, which first appeared in 1940. Books on all aspects of mathematics are included. There are subject, reviewer, and title indexes.
Literary Research and American Postmodernism is a guide to scholarly research in the field of American postmodern literature, which this volume defines as the period between 1950 and 1990. This work aims to provide advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars of literature with a comprehensive view of the print and online resources available in literature and related subject areas. The volume offers best practices for research, especially for the challenges inherent to the field of American postmodernism, and provides scholars with a path toward success in their research endeavors. The opening chapters describe the state of academic research in the literary field and how to formulate an appropriate research topic, develop keywords, and use advanced search techniques to improve search results. One chapter is devoted to how to navigate library catalogs, read a catalog record, and locate materials in libraries worldwide. Subsequent chapters describe general reference resources, print and electronic bibliographies, and scholarly journals that focus on literature in the second half of the twentieth century. The author identifies resources for locating the book reviews and historical magazines and newspapers that can offer insight into the history of particular author’s publications. The unique challenges and promises of archival research are outlined, along with tips for getting the most out of a trip to a special collections library to perform primary research. Web resources and techniques for finding scholarly resources on the Internet are addressed in addition to subscription-based or library-owned materials. The final chapter synthesizes the information described in the previous chapters by taking the reader through a real-life research question and demonstrating how a scholar might locate resources on a difficult topic. An appendix of resources in related fields suggests additional directions the researcher might explore.
Characterized by its move away from Romanticism and toward mundane, every day subjects, as well as incorporating such ideas as metanarrative, stream of consciousness, and disjointed timelines, the American Modernist Era was at its heyday during the years 1914-1949. It produced such great authors as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and memorable works like As I Lay Dying and The Great Gatsby. Literary Research and the American Modernist Era offers the scholar and researcher a clear introduction to the best contemporary library resources and practices for researching American modernist writing. Graduate students, advanced undergraduates, researchers, and scholars specializing in American modernist writing will improve their information skills and fluency, whether in the real or the virtual library. Even those lacking access to some of the resources described here can profit from this overview of literary research because it will help them frame questions, indicate where to go for answers, and demonstrate useful connections between many of the secondary scholarly sources. This guide offers a coherent account of how contemporary research skills and resources can complement one another in helping the scholar effectively deal with typical challenges they encounter in their work
