The Correspondence of Sarah Helen Whitman and Julia Deane Freeman
The Correspondence of Sarah Helen Whitman and Julia Deane Freeman

Author: Catherine Kunce

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-11-21

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1611494397

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The eighty-one manuscript letters, drafts, notes, and fragments comprising the correspondence between Sarah Helen Whitman (Poe’s onetime fiancée) and Julia Deane Freeman span a tumultuous time in American history, 1856–1863. A veritable Who’s Who in literature during the period, the women’s letters reference works and writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Walt Whitman, and scores of women writers such as Margaret Fuller, Paulina Davis, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Susan Warner, Julia Ward Howe, and E.D.E.N. Southworth, and their works. Comparing prominent publishers, critiquing famous journalists, discussing current events—including the impending Civil War, slavery, the spread of Spiritualism, the rising consciousness of women’s rights, and the prevailing tastes in theater, music, and art—the correspondence exposes an untapped vein of historical riches. Yet the letters offer more than a compendium of literary works and historical events. When viewed through the lens of contemporary critical theories, the letters shimmer with significance. The Whitman/Freeman correspondence witnesses the growth of a profound friendship, the genesis and development of which parallels, to a startling degree, Whitman’s affair with Poe. The letters additionally support, and in some instances, complicate, contemporary scholars’ perspectives regarding issues related to women. While scholars have rescued many nineteenth-century women writers from unmerited obscurity, Whitman and Freeman recount in “real time” their assessment of contemporary women writers. A well-informed abolitionist who bequeathed a portion of her estate to a black orphanage, Whitman has much to say about political viewpoints, both national and local, during a time that denied women the right to vote. How Whitman negotiates society’s strictures and her iconoclastic self-expression deserves careful study in itself. Well crafted and thoroughly engaging, the previously unpublished correspondence between Sarah Helen Whitman and Julia Deane Freeman provides scholars of numerous disciplines with fresh and fascinating material.

Wicked Weird & Wily Yankees
Wicked Weird & Wily Yankees

Author: Stephen Gencarella

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1493032674

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Incredible Stories of the Prophets, Vagabonds, Fortune-Tellers, Hermits, Lords, and Poets Who Shaped New England New England has been a lot of things—an economic hub, a cultural center, a sports mecca—but it is also home to many of the strangest individuals in America. Wicked Weird & Wily Yankees explores and celebrates the eccentric personalities who have left their mark in a way no other book has before. Some folks are known, others not so much, but the motley cast of characters that emerges from these pages represents a fascinating cross-section of New England’s most peculiar denizens. Look inside to find: Tales of the Leather Man and the Old Darned Man, who both spent years crisscrossing the highways and byways of the northeast, their origins and motivation to remain forever unknown. The magnificent homes of William Gillette and Madame Sherri, famed socialites who constructed enormous castles in the New England countryside. William Sheldon’s apocalyptic prophecies and wild claims including that the American Revolution had hastened the end of the world and that he could—through his mastery of the “od-force”—prevent cholera across the eastern United States. The mysterious fortune-teller Moll Pitcher whose predictions, some say, were sought by European royalty and whose fame made her the subject of poems, plays, and novels long after her death. Stretching back to the colonial era and covering the development and evolution of New England society through the beginning of the twenty-first century, this book captures the rebel spirit, prickly demeanors, and wily attitudes that have made the region the hotbed for oddity it is today. *All Royalties Donated to the Education and Youth Programs at the Connecticut River Museum*

Humbug!
Humbug!

Author: Wendy Jean Katz

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2020-02-03

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0823285391

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Approximately 300 daily and weekly newspapers flourished in New York before the Civil War. A majority of these newspapers, even those that proclaimed independence of party, were motivated by political conviction and often local conflicts. Their editors and writers jockeyed for government office and influence. Political infighting and their related maneuvers dominated the popular press, and these political and economic agendas led in turn to exploitation of art and art exhibitions. Humbug traces the relationships, class animosities, gender biases, and racial projections that drove the terms of art criticism, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War. The inexpensive “penny” papers that appeared in the 1830s relied on advertising to survive. Sensational stories, satire, and breaking news were the key to selling papers on the streets. Coverage of local politicians, markets, crime, and personalities, including artists and art exhibitions, became the penny papers’ lifeblood. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period’s expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down existing ones. Arguing that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized, Humbug covers the changing politics and rhetoric of this criticism. Author Wendy Katz demonstrates how the penny press’s drive for a more egalitarian society affected the taste and values that shaped art, and how the politics of their art criticism changed under pressure from nativists, abolitionists, and expansionists. Chapters explore James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald and its attack on aristocratic monopolies on art; the penny press’s attack on the American Art-Union, an influential corporation whose Board purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar lottery; exposés of the fraudulent trade in Old Masters works; and the efforts of socialists, freethinkers, and bohemians to reject the authority of the past.

Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship
Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship

Author: E. B. White

Publisher: Down East Books

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 160893733X

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During the 1950s and ’60s, writers E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith carried on a long correspondence by letter, despite living only a few miles apart on the coast of Maine. Often the letters were written from one or the other while they were traveling, but missing their homes and friends. The letters represent a witty and charming correspondence between two literary giants, their stories of Maine, the beauty of our region, and the trials and tribulations of living here. Introduced by White's granddaughter, Martha White, the letters show their first formal communications, their chummy middle years, right up to the death of Edmund Ware Smith. Throughout, there is a strong sense of place and community.

From the Forbidden Garden
From the Forbidden Garden

Author: Alejandra Pizarnik

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0838755410

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"This selection of thirty letters and two postcards, written between September 2, 1969, and September 12, 1972, includes most of Pizarnik's correspondence with Spanish writer-editor-artist Antonio Beneyto. From these informative letters we learn about her influences, the artists, poets, and writers she preferred, and her reactions to them. She collaborated on various projects and cultivated many literary and personal ties with writers of the stature of Julio Cortazar, Olga Orozco, Octavio Paz, Pieyre de Mandiargues, Silvina Ocampo, and Luisa Sofovich, among others." "Although the corpus of Pizarnik's writing available in English has expanded in the last twelve years, it is still far from adequate. This is the first time that a selection of letters from Alejandra Pizarnik to Antonio Beneyto has been published in English. The translators hope that this volume will serve English-speaking audiences as a new bridge to her work."--BOOK JACKET.

Dear Professor Einstein
Dear Professor Einstein

Author: Albert Einstein

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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We are often amazed by the curiosity of children and the questions they ask. And letters to and from children are always appealing, especially so when they are written to someone famous. In Dear professor Einstein, Alice Calaprice has gathered a delightful and charming collection of more than sixty letters from children to Albert Einstein. Einstein could not respond to every letter written to him, but the responses he did find the time to write reveal the intimate human side of the great public persona, a man who, though he spent his days contemplating mathematics and physics, was very fond of children and enjoyed being in their company. Whether the children wrote to Einstein for class projects, out of curiosity, or because of prodding from a parent, their letters are amusing, touching, and sometimes quite precocious. Enhancing this correspondence are numerous splendid photographs showing Einstein amid children, wearing an Indian headdress, carrying a puppet of himself, and donning fuzzy slippers, among many other wonderful pictures. This book is complete with a foreword by Einstein's granddaughter Evelyn, a biography and chronology of Einstein's life, and an essay by Einstein scholar Robert Schulmann on the great scientist's educational philosophy.