Willa Cather

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J.T. Moriarty

A biography of the African slave who was taken in and educated by a Boston couple and became well-known because of the poetry she wrote.

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Walt Coburn

Walt Coburn's father pioneered in Montana Territory, joined the Vigilantes who chased road agents, and eventually built up one of the biggest cow outfits in the young state. The Circle C Ranch spread over thirty thousand acres in northern Montana, near the town of Malta. Walt is rather small for age fourteen - only "stirrup high" to his pony Snowflake - when he works on the Circle C and learns a lot from the tough cowboys, and from his own scrapes and falls. His summer vacation from school increases in excitement when Kid Curry and other members of the Wild Bunch loom on the horizon. Stirrup High conveys all the know-how and atmosphere of roughing it on a ranch in 1903.

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Mary Wheeling White

Evelyn Scott (1893-1963), an expatriate of the South, was one of the most active, creative minds among the American modernists, commanding the attention and esteem of her fellow critics and authors for more than two decades. A ruinous denouement of health and career, however, left her all but forgotten by the time of her death, and it is only recently that scholars have begun to appreciate her achievements. In her critical biography of Scott, Mary Wheeling White depicts an independent idealist whose art and personality shared a defining trait: rebellious thinking. At age twenty, Scott fled her home in New Orleans for Brazil, embarking on a lifelong series of love affairs, exiles, and physical, emotional, and financial afflictions. She also began her serious writing, developing many of the techniques of impressionism, stream of consciousness, and symbolic realism that would mark her better work. Over the years she formed friendships with other literary figures - Theodore Dreiser, Emma Goldman, Lola Ridge, Charlotte Wilder, and others - who helped her through many a low time and saw emerge from the turmoil Scott's challenging imagist poetry, startling experimental fiction, and graceful memoirs. Scott is best known for her autobiography Escapade (1923), which recounts her years in Brazil; her shockingly modern first novel, The Narrow House (1921); and The Wave (1929), which has been hailed as the greatest novel about the American Civil War. She published numerous other works, including eight additional novels and another autobiography, and completed a substantial body of writing that remains unpublished. Despite her prodigious oeuvre, Scott, like many other modernist women writers, receded into the shadows through neglect. By rereading her life and works, Mary Wheeling White helps resurrect the recognition Scott's writing deserves and forces a reexamination of the making of literary exemplars during one of the most vital eras in American letters.

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Granville Allen Mawer

"The Wild Colonial Boy -- a fictitious character or a badly corrupted version of Bold Jack Donohoe, a convict bushranger born in Dublin and killed in NSW in 1830? Before the first edition of this book appeared in 2004 the standard reference works were agreed that there was no bushranger called Jack Doolan or Dowling or Duggan active in the 1860s, but they were wrong. Allen Mawer had found John Doolan and confirmed that the song was right to say that he had been born in Castlemaine. Even more remarkably, Doolan's personal history had connections with the song. And how that came about was quite a story in itself."--Page 4 of cover.