Lynching in American Literature and Journalism consists of twelve essays investigating the history and development of writing about lynching as an American tragedy and the ugliest element of national character. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 European Americans. More than 73 percent of the lynchings in the Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. The Lync...

Haiku, Other Arts, and Literary Disciplines investigates the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and determines the relationships between haiku and other arts, such as essay writing, painting, and music, as well as the backgrounds of haiku, such as literary movements, philosophies, and religions that underlie haiku composition. By analyzing the poets who played major roles in the development of haiku and its related genres, these essays illustrate how Japanese haiku poets, a...

American Haiku: New Readings explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and John Gould Fletcher, received stimulus. Since the first English-language hokku (haiku) written by Yone Noguchi in 1903, one of the Imagist poet Ezra Pound’s well-known haiku-...

This collection of ten critical essays is the first scholarly criticism of haiku by Sonia Sanchez, who has exemplified herself for six decades as a major figure in the Black Arts Movement, a central activist in civil rights and women’s movements, and an internationally-known writer in American literature. Sanchez’s haiku, as an integral and prominent part of contemporary African American poetry, have expressed not only her ideas of nature, beauty, and harmony but also her aesthetic experie...

In this minutely detailed, comprehensive chronology, Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu Hakutani document the life in letters of the greatest African American writer of the twentieth century. The author of Black Boy and Native Son, among other works, Wright wrote unflinchingly about the black experience in the United States, where his books still influence discussions of race and social justice. Entries are documented by Wright's journals, articles, and other works published and u...

Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told.When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kauf...

A "compelling" biography of the brilliant abstract expressionist painter who was far more than just Mrs. Jackson Pollock ( Los Angeles Times).Lee Krasner is best known as the artist-wife of Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist painter. Yet in this riveting biography, the first full-length account of her colorful life, Krasner emerges as a significant artist who deserves her place in the twentieth century's cultural lexicon.In this cap...

“Mad Men for the literary world.” —Junot DíazFarrar, Straus and Giroux is arguably the most influential publishing house of the modern era. Home to an unrivaled twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and generation-defining authors like T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen, it’s a cultural institution whose importance approaches that of The New Yorker or The New York Times. But FSG is no ...

A portrait of a great American dynasty and its legacy in business, technology, the arts, and philanthropyMeyer Guggenheim, a Swiss immigrant, founded a great American business dynasty. At their peak in the early twentieth century, the Guggenheims were reckoned among America's wealthiest, and the richest Jewish family in the world after the Rothschilds. They belonged to Our Crowd, that tight social circle of New York Jewish plutocrats, but unlike the others -- primarily merchants an...

The life and architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) have been much-studied, yet there is a consistent division between analyses of his architecture, which exclude any discussion of his daily life, and books that tell the often sensational tale of his life, with barely a passing reference to the buildings themselves. The result is that, despite the large number of volumes on Wright, the most essential part of his life – his life as an architect, working, as he said, ‘in the cause of...

The remarkable life of Paul Robeson, quintessential Harlem Renaissance man: scholar, all-American, actor, activist, and firebrandBorn the son of an ex-slave in New Jersey in 1898, Paul Robeson, endowed with multiple gifts, seemed destined for fame. In his youth, he was as tenacious in the classroom as he was on the football field. After graduating from Rutgers with high honors, he went on to earn a law degree at Columbia. Soon after, he began a stage and film career...

In the first biography of Ginsberg since his death in 1997 and the only one to cover the entire span of his life, Ginsberg's archivist Bill Morgan draws on his deep knowledge of Ginsberg's largely unpublished private journals to give readers an unparalleled and finely detailed portrait of one of America's most famous poets. Morgan sheds new light on some of the pivotal aspects of Ginsberg's life, including the poet's associations with other members of the Beat Generation, his complex relat...