Stirrup high

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Janis P. Stout

"Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day.". "The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T.S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed."--BOOK JACKET.

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Richard Greene

Cassis reveals the private side of Greene - an opinionated, charming, articulate, controversial, complex person who was always at odds with conventional wisdom. The fifty-seven excerpts included in this book contain interviews with Greene as well as personal impressions, diary entries, articles, essays, literary pieces, and recollections by friends and contemporaries that span fifty years. Topics range from Greene's conversion to Catholicism to the writer's role in society. Contributors include such well-known writers as Anthony Burgess, John Mortimer, V. S. Pritchett, Kathleen Raine, A. L. Rowse, Israel Shenker, Kenneth Tynan, and Evelyn Waugh. In this collection of essays, A. F. Cassis sheds light on the mystery of Graham Greene. Novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, journalist, and playwright, Greene (1904-91) is considered one of the finest literary talents of the twentieth century. He combined his abilities as a wonderful storyteller and a master craftsman to bring respectability to the thriller genre, or what the author himself called "entertainments." In his writings, Greene expressed serious and controversial views on religious, political, and social issues.

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Anne Edwards

A biography of Peggy Mitchell Marsh, who led a life as interesting as those of her characters in her epic, Gone with the Wind.

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Billy D. Higgins

"A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas tells the story of Peter Caulder, a free African American settler in the Arkansas Territory. After serving as a rifleman in the War of 1812, Caulder established a community of free-born African Americans in northern Arkansas and was largely accepted by his white neighbors until an 1859 expulsion law forced the community to flee the state and settle in Missouri." "Like many frontier people, Peter Caulder was unschooled and signed his name only with a mark. To document such a man's life and to determine how he thrived within a slave society and came to join a free black backwoods community, Billy Higgins has interwoven oft-neglected primary sources from around the country - many of which are reproduced here. Through the information revealed in censuses, tax records, sutler's account books, army returns, folk stories, land warrants, traveler's journals, and newspaper notices, a fascinating account of Caulder, his family, his friends, and his community has emerged."--BOOK JACKET.