Peg Plunkett

Sample

Willis Barnstone

Focusing on the five years Willis Barnstone spent following his graduation from Bowdoin College, the years of living, thinking, and beginning to write in France, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and England from 1948 to 1953, this fascinating and moving memoir nonetheless expands beyond those years. On one side of that period are the poet and translator's grandparents' immigration to the United States, his parents' stormy relationship and his father's eventual suicide, his childhood growing up in the building where Babe Ruth lived, his first gestures toward a life of poetry in Hawthorne's room at Bowdoin, and his first acquaintance with cultures other than his own while digging privies in remote Indian villages in Mexico during a year off from college. On the other side of that period are Barnstone's continuing life as the gypsy scholar in China, Tibet, Turkey, and Argentina and his continuing friendship with his children and former wife and the finest writers and artists the world over.

Sample

Edward G. Roddy

Biography of William Madison Wood, one of the central figures in the industrial history of the Merrimack Valley (Massachusetts). Wood (1858-1926) was a textile mill owner of who was considered to be an expert in efficiency. He set out to merge some of the small, struggling mills of New England into one mammoth. By 1899, William Wood had convinced seven such mills to join what he called "The Woolen Trust." In April of that same year the company was incorporated under a new name, The American Woolen Company.

Sample

Elizabeth Cary

The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive example of Renaissance drama that serves the desire of today's readers and scholars to know not merely how women were represented in the early modern period but also how they themselves perceived their own condition.

Sample

Edward P. Kohn

The 1896 New York heat wave that killed almost 1,500 people in ten oppressively hot days coincided with a pitched presidential contest between William McKinley and the upstart Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who arrived in New York City at the height of the catastrophe. As historian Edward P. Kohn shows, Bryan's hopes for the presidency began to flag amidst the abhorrent heat just as a bright young police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt was scrambling to mitigate the dangerously high temperatures.