Pity is Not Enough

Pity is Not Enough

Author: Josephine Herbst

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780252066528

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"I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else," Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy, with Pity Is Not Enough as its first volume, shows clearly that Herbst in fact succeeded at storytelling. The book draws loosely on Herbst's family history, using Reconstruction's demise in Georgia to link the advance of free market capitalism to the North's abandonment of its commitment to racial justice. The protagonists-Catherine Trexler and her brother Joe, a carpetbagger embroiled in railroad scandals-are ripped apart financially and psychologically by competing codes of domesticity, Southern manners, and capitalism. In her introduction to the book, Mary Ann Rasmussen argues that Herbst was unlike many other 1930s Leftists in that she refused the "essentialist notions of gender difference that confounded radical men and women of her generation." Herbst's first two novels, published in the late 1920s, were praised by both Katherine Anne Porter and Ernest Hemingway, but the writer gained greater fame with the proletarian fiction and leftist journalism she wrote during the next decade. Though never a member of the Communist Party, Herbst was ostracized as a sympathizer and dismissed from a government job in 1942. Because she never repudiated her radical beliefs and lifestyle, her literary reputation suffered.


Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume Two

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume Two

Author: Philip A. Greasley

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-08-08

Total Pages: 1074

ISBN-13: 0253021162

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The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.


The Novel and the American Left

The Novel and the American Left

Author: Janet Galligani Casey

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2004-06

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1587294753

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The first collection of critical essays to focus specifically on the fiction produced by American novelists of the Depression era, The Novel and the American Left contributes substantially to the newly emerging emphasis on twentieth-century American literary radicalism. Recent studies have recovered this body of work and redefined in historical and theoretical terms its vibrant contribution to American letters. Casey consolidates and expands this field of study by providing a more specific consideration of individual novels and novelists, many of which are reaching new contemporary audiences through reprints. The Novel and the American Left focuses exclusively on left-leaning fiction of the Depression era, lending visibility and increased critical validity to these works and showing the various ways in which they contributed not only to theorizations of the Left but also to debates about the content and form of American fiction. In theoretical terms, the collection as a whole contributes to the larger reconceptualization of American modernity currently under way. More pragmatically, individual essays suggest specific authors, texts, and approaches to teachers and scholars seeking to broaden and/or complicate more traditional “American modernism” syllabi and research agendas. The selected essays take up, among others, such “hard-core"” leftist writers as Mike Gold and Myra Page, who were associated with the Communist Party; the popular novels of James M. Cain and Kenneth Fearing, whose works were made into successful films; and critically acclaimed but nonetheless “lost” novelists such as Josephine Johnson, whose Now in November (Pulitzer Prize, 1936) anticipates and complicates the more popular agrarian mythos of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This volume will be of interest not only to literary specialists but also to historians, social scientists, and those interested in American cultural studies.


Josephine Herbst's Short Fiction

Josephine Herbst's Short Fiction

Author: Barbara Wiedemann

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9781575910079

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A native of Iowa and long-time resident of Pennsylvania, Josephine Herbst (1892-1969), well known and highly regarded in the 1930s, was the author of seven novels, twenty-seven short stories, a biography, and numerous journal and newspaper articles. In the current study, the first on Herbst's short fiction, the author provides a critical discussion of each of Herbst's stories, including relevant biographical and historical data.


The Tragic Conservatism of Ernest Hemingway

The Tragic Conservatism of Ernest Hemingway

Author: Sam Bluefarb

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2012-11-30

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1479755273

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The six essays in this collection were written over the years 2010-2012. Most of the essays are literary in nature. These touch on the works of Ernest Hemingway his tragic conservatism of Lionel Trilling, mentor to a generation of teachers of literature, and of Henry Miller. In the case of Miller, the essay is as much a critique of his social and spiritual values as literary. The essay on The Age of the Grand Hotel is a historical and social analysis of the part such hotels have played in the growth and decline of upper class society.


Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time

Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time

Author: Earl Rovit

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2006-03-31

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780826418258

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John Steinbeck Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner are generally recognized as the most influential American novelists of the 20th century. Their careers paralleled one another in significant ways - two of their fledgling poems coincidentally appeared in the same avant-garde little magazine; they died a year apart, almost to the day; each won the Nobel Prize. It is as much biography as critique, a short, happy reference work that sometimes tells more about the commentators than their subjects. Among the writers on the writers, there is Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and many others. This book is not only a valuable addition to literary scholarship, it is also a unique re-creation of an era in American culture.


The Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa

The Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa

Author: E. Paul Durrenberger

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1646422082

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In The Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa E. Paul Durrenberger recounts the transformation of Iowa’s family farms into today’s agricultural industry through the lens of the lives and writings of Iowa novelist Paul Corey and poet Ruth Lechlitner. This anthropological biography analyzes Corey’s fiction, Lechlitner’s poetry, and their professional and personal correspondence to offer a new perspective on an era (1925–1947) that saw the collapse and remaking of capitalism in the United States, the rise of communism in the Soviet Union, the rise and defeat of fascism around the world, and the creation of a continuous warfare state in America. Durrenberger tells the story that Corey aimed to record and preserve of the industrialization of Iowa’s agriculture and the death of its family farms. He analyzes Corey’s regionalist focus on Iowa farming and regionalism’s contemporaneous association in Europe with rising fascism. He explores Corey’s adoption of naturalism, evident in his resistance to heroes and villains, to plot structure and resolution, and to moral judgment, as well as his ethnographic tendency to focus on groups rather than individuals. An unusual and wide-ranging study, The Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa offers important insight into the relationships among fiction, individual lives, and anthropological practice, as well as into a pivotal period in American history.


A to Z of American Women Writers

A to Z of American Women Writers

Author: Carol Kort

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2014-05-14

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1438107935

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Presents a biographical dictionary profiling important women authors, including birth and death dates, accomplishments and bibliography of each author's work.