Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman's prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the ......
The Literary Friendship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
One of the twentieth century's most intriguing and complicated literary friendships was that between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In death, their reputations have reversed, but in the early 1940s Rawlings had already achieved wild success with her best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Yearling, while Hurston had ......
The first in-depth biography of distinguished academic novelist Stanley ElkinShouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of ......
Born in Chicago in 1870, Frank Norris led a life of adventure and art. He moved to San Francisco at fifteen, spent two years in Paris painting, and returned to San Francisco to become an internationally famous author. He died at age thirty-two from a ruptured appendix. During his short life, he wrote an inspired series of novels about the United ......
The first accurate and thorough biography of the man behind the myths of the Old West.Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early ......
Author and historian Garrett Peck traces Willa Cather's adventures in the Southwest and how they influenced her best book. Six months before she died, Willa Cather called her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop her "best book." The Atlantic magazine concurred, including Archbishop on its Great American Novels list in 2024. A perennial ......
Elizabeth Jordan, Journalist, Editor, and Mystery Author
Unravel the intriguing life of a woman who edited the literary greats of her day and forged a path to the Golden Age of mystery writing. Elizabeth Garver Jordan was renowned not only for her own writing but also for her influence in journalism and literature. Her love of intrigue started when she was five and made a secret pact with the family ......
A compilation of personal photographs, historical images, and written excerpts illuminating Ernest Hemingway's significant ties to northern Michigan.In the early 1900s, the Little Traverse Bay area in northern Michigan was transitioning from a sparsely populated lumber region to a hotspot for tourists. Looking to enhance dwindling freight ......
