Best known for Our Southern Highlanders (1913) and Camping and Woodcraft (1916), Horace Kephart’s keen interest in exploring and documenting the great outdoors would lead him not only to settle in Bryson City, North Carolina, but also to become the most significant writer about the Great Smoky Mountains in the early twentieth century.Edited by Mae Miller Claxton and George Frizzell, Horace Kephart: Writings extends past Kephart’s two well-read works of th...

Since the publication of her groundbreaking novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison (b. 1949) has been known—along with Larry Brown and Lee Smith—as a purveyor of the working-class, contemporary South. Allison has frequently used her position, through passionate lectures and enthusiastic interviews, to give voice to issues dear to her: poverty, working-class life, domestic violence, feminism and women’s relationships, the contemporary South, and gay/lesbian life. Often cal...

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sharon Deykin Baris, Carolyn J. Brown, Lee Anne Bryan, Keith Cartwright, Stuart Christie, Mae Miller Claxton, Virginia Ottley Craighill, David A. Davis, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Kevin Eyster, Dolores Flores-Silva, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Dawn Gilchrist, Rebecca L. Harrison, Casey Kayser, Michael Kreyling, Ebony Lumumba, Suzanne Marrs, Pearl Amelia McHaney, David McWhirter, Laura Sloan Patterson, Harriet Pollack, Gary Richards, C...

Since the publication of Serena in 2008 earned him a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner fiction prize, Ron Rash (b. 1953) has gained attention as one of the South's finest writers. Rash draws upon his family's history in Appalachia, where most members have worked with their hands as farmers or millworkers. In the Grit Lit or Rough South genre, Rash maintains a prominent place as a skilled craftsman and triple threat, publishing four collections of poetry, six short story collections,...

Georgia has played a formative role in the writing of America. Few states have produced a more impressive array of literary figures, among them Conrad Aiken, Erskine Caldwell, James Dickey, Joel Chandler Harris, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Toomer, and Alice Walker.This volume contains biographical and critical discussions of Georgia writers from the nineteenth century to the present as well as other information pertinent to Georgia literature. Organized in alphabetica...

You're no idiot, of course. You know that Samuel Clemens had a better-known pen name, Moby Dick is a famous whale, and the Raven only said,"Nevermore." But when it comes to understanding the great works of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, you'd rather rent the videos than head to your local library. Don't tear up your library card yet! The Complete Idiot's Guide® to American Literature teaches you all about the rich tradition of American prose and poetry, so you c...

A renowned cultural critic untangles the twisted history and future of racism through its most volatile word.The N Word reveals how the term "nigger" has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America over the four hundred years since it was first spoken on our shores. Jabari Asim pinpoints Thomas Jefferson as the source of our enduring image of the "nigger." In a seminal but now obscure essay, Jefferson marshaled a welter of pseudoscience to ...

At the greatest moments and in the cruelest times, black women have been a crucial part of America's history. Now, the inspiring history of black women in America is explored in vivid detail by two leaders in the fields of African American and women's history.A Shining Thread of Hope chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South...

“ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has ...

Celebrated scholar Carla Kaplan’s cultural biography, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, focuses on white women, collectively called “Miss Anne,” who became Harlem Renaissance insiders.The 1920s in New York City was a time of freedom, experimentation, and passion—with Harlem at the epicenter. White men could go uptown to see jazz and modern dance, but women who embraced black culture too enthusiastically could be ostracized.Miss Anne in Harlem fo...

A finalist for the 1972 National Book Award, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant" and "provocative," Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword by acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad. As Rampersad notes, "Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the ...

Oscar Micheaux was the Jackie Robinson of film, the black D. W. Griffith: a bigger-than-life American folk hero whose important life story is nearly forgotten today. Now, in a feat of historical investigation and vivid storytelling, one of our greatest film biographers takes on one of the most talented and complex figures in the history of American entertainment.The son of freed slaves, Micheaux grew up in Metropolis, Illinois, then roamed America as a Pullman porter before making ...