The poet and the vampyre

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William Empson and David Pirie

Introduces the life of author Samuel Taylor Coleridge and presents a sample of his poetry, including complete works and excerpts, with a brief, explanatory introduction to each.

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Barbara Ozieblo

"During her lifetime, playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was regarded as highly as Eugene O'Neill and Edith Wharton. Winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama (for Alison's House), she was cofounder of the Provincetown Players, the little theater that "discovered" O'Neill. Later, Glaspell was instrumental in introducing American drama to English audiences when her play The Verge was produced in London. Yet despite her many accomplishments, Glaspell is often overlooked in the standard histories of American theater. Now, Barbara Ozieblo returns this intriguing and important figure to the spotlight.". "Ozieblo combines an engaging narrative of Glaspell's life with insightful analysis of her creative works. Rebelling early against the expectations imposed on women of her era, Glaspell grappled with the conflict between Victorian mores and feminist aspirations throughout her life. In Trifles, now recognized as a groundbreaking feminist drama, she explored the reasons for a woman's extreme response to her husband's demanding, authoritarian stance. Ozieblo also investigates Glaspell's relationship with dramatist George Cram Cook, exploring the scandal that surrounded their courtship and marriage as well as the life they led among the bohemians of Greenwich Village."--BOOK JACKET.

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Shari Benstock

The first new biography of America's foremost woman of letters in twenty years, No Gifts from Chance presents an Edith Wharton for our times. Far from the emotionally withdrawn and neurasthenic victim of earlier portraits, she is revealed here as an ambitious, disciplined, and self-determined woman who fashioned life to her own desires. Drawing on government records, legal and medical documents, and recently opened collections of Wharton's letters, Shari Benstocks̀ biography offers new information on what have been called the key mysteries of her life: the question of her paternity, her troubled relations with her mother and older brothers, her marriage to manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, and her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton. No Gifts from Chance also examines long-ignored facets of Wharton's life - her complex and often calculating relationships with publishers, her internationally acclaimed charitable work during World War I, and the poignant story of her ultimate financial distress that contributed to her death, a story told here for the first time. At the center of this biography is Wharton's writing life. No Gifts from Chance charts her immense literary productivity (some forty-seven books, including The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome), tracking her writing processes from notebook entries through editorial revisions and examining the critical reception of her narrative fiction, poetry, travel writing, literary and cultural criticism, and memoir. Here, too, is a rare glimpse of the intricate relationship between the writer's public reputation and her private life, from her lonely literary apprenticeship in late-Victorian America to her emergence as a literary figure in Edwardian England and Belle Epoque Paris, when she developed enduring friendships with Henry James and Bernard Berenson, to her Age of Acclaim as America's most respected writer during the postwar jazz age. A magisterial Edith Wharton dominates these pages: astute and tough-minded in business, passionate and sexually confident in love, audacious and prolific in her art, principled and courageous in her life. This is the story of an artist who had no role models in a society that feared creative and independent women, but who triumphantly defied convention and made herself into America's first great and most beloved woman novelist.

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James Boylan

When they fell in love amid the tumult of the 1905 Russian revolution, they believed they were destiny's match: William English Walling, a wealthy American journalist activist from the Midwest, and Anna Strunsky, an aspiring novelist from San Francisco. Vowing to dedicate themselves to socialist ideals, they soon became celebrities who moved in an elite circle of writers, journalists, and reformers. Ultimately, both their marriage and their political commitment faltered, but not before they had participated in some of the most urgent social causes of their day. Boylan enriches our understanding of the intellectual and cultural background of prewar socialism by skillfully tracing the interplay between private and public lives. At the same time, he illuminates the struggle of those who were born Victorians to adjust to the changing public arena of the modern world.