The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film...

"An excellent study that should interest film buffs, academics, and non-academics alike" ( Journal of the West).Hollywood's West examines popular perceptions of the frontier as a defining feature of American identity and history. Seventeen essays by prominent film scholars illuminate the allure of life on the edge of civilization and analyze how this region has been represented on big and small screens.Differing characterizations of the fr...

A Quote A Day for Writers: 365 Quotations on the Art, Craft, Humor, Heartbreak, Joys and Magic of WritingThe monthly series - now collected in one volume!January—Getting StartedFebruary—Writing is WorkMarch—Writing is LifeApril—A Writer is a ReaderMay—The CraftJune—The WordsJuly—The CharactersAugust—Stumbling BlocksSeptember—Silence & SolitudeOctober—Mystery & MagicNovember—The Hu...

A century ago, daily life ground to a halt when the circus rolled into town. Across America, banks closed, schools canceled classes, farmers left their fields, and factories shut down so that everyone could go to the show. In this entertaining and provocative book, Janet Davis links the flowering of the early-twentieth-century American railroad circus to such broader historical developments as the rise of big business, the breakdown of separate spheres for men and women, and the genesis of...

Soul of a People is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, the book reveals their experi...

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of American literature composed after World War II is the rejection of conventional form and structure with its increasingly uninhibited and experimental style. Embracing works from previously marginalized groups like African Americans and women and ushering in new genres, contemporary American literature has progressively begun to mirror the American population in diversity and versatility. In this volume, readers are invited to think critically ab...

Offering both in-depth analyses of specific films and overviews of the industry's output, Hollywood's Indian provides insightful characterizations of the depiction of the Native Americans in film. This updated edition includes a new chapter on Smoke Signals , the groundbreaking independent film written by Sherman Alexie and directed by Chris Eyre. Taken as a whole the essays explore the many ways in which these portrayals have made an impact on our collective cultural life.

When in 1902 Owen Wister, a member of the Eastern blueblood aristocracy and friend of novelist Henry James, became a best-selling novelist with the publication of The Virginian, few readers would have guessed that a new kind of American literature was being born. While Owen Wister was enjoying his success, Edwin S. Porter in New Jersey was filming the first cinema Western The Great Train Robbery, which would usher in a new era both of movies in general and of Western movi...

**"Superb, scrupulously researched . . . a comprehensive narrative for understanding the changing reception of Little Women." —Gregory Eiselein, coeditor of The Louisa May Alcott EncyclopediaThe hit Broadway show of 1912. The lost film of 1919. Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, sliding down a banister in George Cukor's 1933 movie. Mark English's shimmering 1967 illustrations. Jo—this time played by Sutton Foster—belting "I'll be / astonishing" in the 2004 Broadwa...

Born in Missouri at the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hart Benton would become the most notorious and celebrated painter America had ever seen. The first artist to make the cover of Time, he was a true original: an heir to both the rollicking populism of his father's political family and the quiet life of his Appalachian grandfather. In his twenties, he would find his calling in New York, where he was drawn to memories of his small-town youth—and to visions of the American...

Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century—the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most me...