Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.
Darwin's Notebook is a biography of the great man, but a biography with a difference. As you would expect, it provides a full and detailed account of Darwin's life and discoveries, but it is written, designed and illustrated to look like - as the title suggests - a personal notebook or journal.By mining the rich sources of his own journals and incorporating a wide range of quotations and primary sources, Darwin's Notebook brings its subject to life more vividly than any ordinary history book or biography, revealing the man behind the theory of evolution. Additional chapters examine Darwin's early life and education, his family life, his later writings, the reactions to his work and his long-term legacy.
A family's recently discovered correspondence provides the inspiration for this fascinating and deeply moving account of Jewish family life before, during and after the Holocaust. Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey reveal how the Kaufmann-Steinberg family was pulled apart under the Nazi regime and dispersed over three continents. The family's unique eight-way correspondence across two generations brings into sharp focus the dilemma of Jews in Nazi Germany facing the painful decisions of when, if and to where they should emigrate. The authors capture the family members' fluctuating emotions of hope, optimism, resignation and despair as well as the day-to-day concerns, experiences and dynamics of family life despite increasing persecution and impending deportation. Headed by two sisters who were among the first female business owners in Essen, the family was far from conventional and their story contributes new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish life in Germany and in exile during these dark years.
Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works. In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.
An examination of the ways in which the American experience influenced some of the major Jewish leaders during and between the world wars. The Israeli-American Connection examines the ways in which the American experience influenced some of the major leaders of the yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, during and between the world wars. In six biographical chapters, Michael Brown studies Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Nahman Bialik, Berl Katznelson, Henrietta Szold, Golda Meir, and David Ben-Gurian, focusing on each leader's involvement with and image of America, as well as the impact of America on their lives and careers.
Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of those in his third collection, The Map of Love (1939). Thomas sold four of the notebooks, spanning May 1930 to May 1934, to the University of Buffalo in 1941. However, the existence of a fifth notebook, covering the period June 1934 to August 1935, was unknown until 2014, the centenary of his birth. The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas makes this newly-discovered text available to readers and researchers for the first time. It contains the only existing MSS versions of Thomas's most challenging poems, 'I, in my intricate image' and 'Altarwise by owl-light', and fourteen other early poems. It contains facsimiles and full transcripts of the originals, is annotated throughout, and has a full scholarly introduction. Exploring the contexts of these brilliant and experimental lyrics – many with substantial reworkings and variant passages – this landmark publication sheds new light on the creative practice of one of the most important and well-known poets of the twentieth century.
Wittgenstein’s Whewell’s Court Lectures contains previously unpublished notes from lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein between 1938 and 1941. The volume offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein’s thought and includes some of the finest examples of Wittgenstein’s lectures in regard to both content and reliability. Many notes in this text refer to lectures from which no other detailed notes survive, offering new contexts to Wittgenstein’s examples and metaphors, and providing a more thorough and systematic treatment of many topics Each set of notes is accompanied by an editorial introduction, a physical description and dating of the notes, and a summary of their relation to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass Offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas, in particular his ideas about certainty and concept-formation The lectures include more than 70 illustrations of blackboard drawings, which underline the importance of visual thought in Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy Challenges the dating of some already published lecture notes, including the Lectures on Freedom of the Will and the Lectures on Religious Belief
American social critics in the 1970s, convinced that their nation was in decline, turned to psychoanalysis for answers and seized on narcissism as the sickness of the age. Books indicting Americans as greedy, shallow, and self-indulgent appeared, none more influential than Christopher Lasch’s famous 1978 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. This line of critique reached a crescendo the following year in Jimmy Carter’s “malaise speech” and has endured to this day. But as Elizabeth Lunbeck reveals, the American critics missed altogether the breakthrough in psychoanalytic thinking that was championing narcissism’s positive aspects. Psychoanalysts had clashed over narcissism from the moment Freud introduced it in 1914, and they had long been split on its defining aspects: How much self-love, self-esteem, and self-indulgence was normal and desirable? While Freud’s orthodox followers sided with asceticism, analytic dissenters argued for gratification. Fifty years later, the Viennese émigré Heinz Kohut led a psychoanalytic revolution centered on a “normal narcissism” that he claimed was the wellspring of human ambition, creativity, and empathy. But critics saw only pathology in narcissism. The result was the loss of a vital way to understand ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Narcissism’s rich and complex history is also the history of the shifting fortunes and powerful influence of psychoanalysis in American thought and culture. Telling this story, The Americanization of Narcissism ultimately opens a new view on the central questions faced by the self struggling amid the tumultuous crosscurrents of modernity.
General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. Daybooks and Notebooks is an invaluable source for reference on Whitman’s daily activities. This sixteen-year record supplements the biographical information provided in the six volumes of Whitman's Correspondence, functioning as an account book, diary, journal, commonplace book, and notebook all in one. When Whitman began to keep them, the Daybooks were a personal record of predominantly business matters. As William White wrote in the introduction, “He was not only the author but the publisher of his works: he was likewise his own business manager, ship, and promoter. Whatever records he kept, of his sales and distribution, of printing and binding figures, of poetry and prose he sent to newspapers and magazines . . . he entered on the right-hand pages.” Volume II thus offers a rare look at Whitman as a businessman, tending as much to practical matters as to art.