The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure
The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure

Author: C. D. Rose

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2014-11-04

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 161219379X

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A darkly comic, satirical reference book about writers who never made it into the literary canon A signal event of literary scholarship, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure compiles the biographies of history’s most notable cases of a complete lack of literary success. As such, it is the world’s leading authority on the subject. Compiled in one volume by C. D. Rose, a well-educated person universally acknowledged in parts of England as the world’s pre-eminent expert on inexpert writers, the book culls its information from lost or otherwise ignored archives scattered around the globe, as well as the occasional dustbin. The dictionary amounts to a monumental accomplishment: the definitive appreciation of history’s least accomplished writers. Thus immortalized beyond deserving and rescued from hard-earned obscurity, the authors presented in this historic volume comprise a who’s who of the talentless and deluded, their stories timeless litanies of abject psychosis, misapplication, and delinquency. It is, in short, a treasure.

The Chicago of Fiction
The Chicago of Fiction

Author: James A. Kaser

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 1461672589

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The importance of Chicago in American culture has made the city's place in the American imagination a crucial topic for literary scholars and cultural historians. While databases of bibliographical information on Chicago-centered fiction are available, they are of little use to scholars researching works written before the 1980s. In The Chicago of Fiction: A Resource Guide, James A. Kaser provides detailed synopses for more than 1,200 works of fiction significantly set in Chicago and published between 1852 and 1980. The synopses include plot summaries, names of major characters, and an indication of physical settings. An appendix provides bibliographical information for works dating from 1981 well into the 21st century, while a biographical section provides basic information about the authors, some of whom are obscure and would be difficult to find in other sources. Written to assist researchers in locating works of fiction for analysis, the plot summaries highlight ways in which the works touch on major aspects of social history and cultural studies (i.e., class, ethnicity, gender, immigrant experience, and race). The book is also a useful reader advisory tool for librarians and readers who want to identify materials for leisure reading, particularly since genre, juvenile, and young adult fiction, as well as literary fiction, are included.

The Trouble in Room 519
The Trouble in Room 519

Author: Thomas Aiello

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-08-18

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0807175986

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At approximately seven o’clock in the evening on May 7, 1950, Gordon Malherbe Hillman filled an empty bottle with water, capped it, and walked into his mother’s room in the pair’s fifth-floor suite at Boston’s luxurious Copley Plaza Hotel. He then edged up behind the semi-invalid woman and bludgeoned her to death. Hotel staff had planned to evict the two the following day after several weeks of unpaid rent. Mounting debts had finally broken the fifty-year-old Hillman, a now-struggling author of mixed success, but it had not always been that way, as Thomas Aiello shows in his study of the life and work of this forgotten midcentury figure. As a youth, Hillman attended the prestigious Noble and Greenough School near Boston. Pursuing a career as a writer, he published several dozen pieces of short fiction and a critically acclaimed novel, Fortune’s Cup (1941). Hollywood studios purchased the rights to two of his stories and made them into films, The Great Man Votes (1939) and Here I Am a Stranger (1940). But Hillman remained, for the most part, a middling magazine writer like the majority of fiction authors working during the Depression. Although most did not resort to acts of manic violence, Hillman’s tenuous position in literary circles, along with his gradual descent into financial ruin, proved a far more common tale than the stories of literary success often pored over by critics and historians of this period. In The Trouble in Room 519: Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century, Aiello weaves a compelling true crime narrative into his exploration of the economics of magazine fiction and the strains placed on authors by the publishing industry prior to World War II. Examining Hillman’s writing as exemplary of Depression-era popular fiction, Aiello includes eight stories written by Hillman and originally published in prominent midcentury American magazines, including Collier’s, Liberty, and McCall’s, to provide additional context and insight into this trying time and tragic life.

Earl Hamner
Earl Hamner

Author: James E. Person (Jr.)

Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9781581824551

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"Since Spencer's Mountain I have followed Earl Hamner's career with much interest and much satisfaction, having picked a winner." --Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird Earl Hamner, one of America's best-loved storytellers, has never been the subject of a full-length study. Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow fills that gap. A native Virginian, Hamner once said, "Even though families are said to be shattered these days, and God is said to be dead, if people can revisit the scenes and places where these values did exist, possibly they can come to believe in them again, or . . . to adapt some kind of belief in God, or faith in the family unit, or just getting home again." This vision of what makes for a whole life permeates all of Hamner's work. It is present in the novel Spencer's Mountain, upon which The Waltons was loosely based, and in his screenplays, such as the work he is perhaps most proud of, Charlotte's Web. It is even present in such unlikely places as the eight scripts he contributed to the classic television series The Twilight Zone and the tales of cold-blooded betrayal and boundless ambition depicted on Falcon Crest. In Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow, readers will discover the integrated nature of his career, finding that there is no real conflict between the warm folksiness of The Waltons, the offbeat fantasies of his Twilight Zone scripts, the unscrupulous ethics displayed on Falcon Crest, and the myriad other novels and scripts he has written and TV programs he has produced. Instead, readers will find that there is a pervasive theme running throughout Hamner's work, that of a man forever taking a backward glance at his roots for direction in finding what makes life worthwhile. Upon learning that this book was being written, Hamner told one of his friends, "I can't imagine anyone wanting to read a book about me, much less write one about me." Readers of this book will find Hamner's doubts indeed misplaced. They will also discover a delightful individual who has enjoyed a long, accomplished career as a storyteller laboring for a worthy goal: that posterity may know of an age and a people whose legacy has not, through silence, been permitted to pass away as if a dream.

William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization
William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization

Author: William Gilmore Simms

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2014-02-07

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1611172969

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During William Gilmore Simms's life (1806-1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer's hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays. Together, the reviews and essays reveal the regional, national, and international dimensions of Simms's intellectual interests. To frame the two distinct parts of Selected Reviews, James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen have written a general introduction that considers the development of book reviewing and the authorship of essays in cultural and historical contexts. In part one, Kibler offers an introduction that examines Simms's reviewing habits and the aesthetic and critical values that informed the author's reviews. Kibler then publishes selected texts of reviews and provides historical and cultural backgrounds for each selection. Simms was an early proponent of the critical theories of Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Widely read in European history and literature, he reviewed works published in French, German, and classics in original Greek and Latin and in translation. Simms also was an early, ardent advocate of works of local color and of southern "backwoods" humorists of his day. Simms published notices of seven of Herman Melville's novels, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and favorably reviewed Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Simms published numerous review essays of twenty thousand or more words in literary journals and also republished two collections in book form. These volumes treated such subjects as Americanism in literature and the American Revolution in South Carolina. Yet, as part two of Selected Reviews demonstrates, Simms ranged much more widely in the intellectual milieu. Such cultural and political topics as the 1848 revolution in France, the history of the literary essay, the roles of women in the American Revolution, and the activities of the southern convention in Nashville in 1850 captured Simms's attention. Moltke-Hansen's introduction to part two examines Simms's roles in, and responses to, the Romantic critical revolution and the other revolutions then roiling Europe and America.

Homosexuality in the Work of Gore Vidal
Homosexuality in the Work of Gore Vidal

Author: Jörg Behrendt

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9783825856465

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Since his first novel with a homosexual topic, The City and the Pillar, appeared in 1948, Gore Vidal has been seen as an enfant terrible of American letters. Through his ongoing writing career, he has examined (homo)sexuality in the context of cultural, religious and socio- political developments, so that it is fascinating to revisit his critical, sometimes cynical and always wittily presented ideas which were formed at a time when Gay Liberation, Gay Literature and Gay Identity were still unheard of and to discover the meaning these ideas still hold for us today.

The Encyclopedia of the Gothic
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic

Author: William Hughes

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 880

ISBN-13: 1119210410

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The Encylopedia of the Gothic features a series of newly-commissioned essays from experts in Gothic studies that cover all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture. Comprises over 200 newly commissioned entries written by a stellar cast of over 130 experts in the field Arranged in A-Z format across two fully cross-referenced volumes Represents the definitive reference guide to all aspects of the Gothic Provides comprehensive coverage of relevant authors, national traditions, critical developments, and notable texts that define, shape, and inform the genre Extends beyond a purely literary analysis to explore Gothic elements of film, music, drama, art, and architecture. Explores the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture

A Tale of Two Worlds
A Tale of Two Worlds

Author: Vjenceslav Novak

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2014-03-10

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 6155225834

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In this novel, written by the esteemed novelist in 1901, a provincial composer and organist from Croatia struggles to find his way along the perilous frontier between the worlds of artistic vocation and humdrum family life. The local kapellmeister—-a Czech, in good Habsburg tradition, and a confidant of Gaj and Palacky, influential politicians of the time—-recognizes young Amadej Zlatanic as a prodigy and persuades the stingy mayor and stubborn parish priest to pack the teenager off to the conservatory in Prague. After several years of sordid student purgatory, Amadej returns to Croatia—-ready for love and ready to make great art.The world of Central Europe in the 1860s flows past, and Amadej tries to keep abreast of political change. At the same time he ducks and dodges predatory relatives and townspeople in his native district, to which he has returned for the sake of employment. Despite his marriage to the impressionable and vulnerable local beauty, Adelka, and his devotion to their daughter Veruska, Amadej is sorely troubled by the political corruption and isolation of Croatia. His wife takes ill and his family is poor. Yet ultimately it is the vulgar, populist notion of Croatian "identity"—-symbolized by the worship of the tamburica, a local musical instrument—-that crushes Amadej's career. As it does so, he contemplates the two worlds of national greatness, amidst the Croatian national awakening, and international fame. Finally, frustrated beyond relief by unsuccessful affairs both amorous and professional, and tortured by the philistinism surrounding him, Amadej leaves the world of sanity for a mind-blowing descent into the maniacal and inescapable world of hallucination, paganism, and paranoia.

A Black Arts Poetry Machine
A Black Arts Poetry Machine

Author: David Grundy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-02-07

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1350061980

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A vital hub of poetry readings, performance, publications and radical politics in 1960s New York, the Umbra Workshop was a cornerstone of the African American avant-garde. Bringing together new archival research and detailed close readings of poetry, A Black Arts Poetry Machine is a groundbreaking study of this important but neglected group of poets. David Grundy explores the work of such poets as Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas and Calvin Hernton and how their innovative poetic forms engaged with radical political responses to state violence and urban insurrection. Through this examination, the book highlights the continuing relevance of the work of the Umbra Workshop today and is essential reading for anyone interested in 20th-century American poetry.