Linda Wagner-Martin

This new biography focuses on the complex Hemingway when fame is hitting full force - the years between A Farewell to Arms and the writing of For Whom The Bell Tolls. In a sympathetic narrative, Michael Reynolds creates a rich map of Hemingway's journey from promising young novelist to literary lion. He gives us the look and feel of the times and the people, as well as the give and take of literary life. These are the years of Hemingway's Esquire essays and war dispatches, the years that produced "Snows of Kilimanjaro" and Green Hills of Africa, years from which emerged the larger-than-life Hemingway. We come away from this book knowing more about what Hemingway wrote and why. We also know more about where we as a people have been, for Hemingway explored every element of his decade with the intensity of a natural historian. Drawing on a wealth of new material and period documents, Reynolds adds a human touch to a writer too often seen only in caricature.

Four young sisters follow their parents to an African mission where their father will be the missionary. Extremely well written account in each of the girls' voices. The father's insanity unfolds through their eyes. The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters--the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility. Dancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking possibilities of human hope, The Poisonwood Bible possesses all that has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver's previous work, and extends this beloved writer's vision to an entirely new level. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

"The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism offers readers a fresh, insightful overview to all genres of postmodern writing. Drawing on a variety of works from not only mainstream authors but also those that are arguably unconventional, renowned scholar Linda Wagner-Martin gives the reader a solid framework and foundation to reading, understanding,a nd appreciating postmodern literature since its inception through the present day."-- book cover.

Includes a brief biography of the author, thematic and structural analysis of the work, critical views, and an index of themes and ideas.

Essays that discuss Hemingway's first novel including the use of humor, its literary and historical context, Brett, the modern "new woman", and the issues of sexuality.

"This work is an introduction to and overview of Kingsolver's work, opening with an annotated chronology of her life, activism, writings and awards, which is followed by a family tree. The 122 encyclopedic entries describe and analyze characters, dates, historical figures and events, allusions, literary motifs, and themes from Kingsolver's works, combining insights with generous citations from primary and secondary sources. Each entry ends with a selected bibliography. Appendices include a timeline of events in The Poisonwood Bible and a list of 46 writing and research topics. The book concludes with a comprehensive bibliography and index."--BOOK JACKET.

Inspired by extensive original research, Linda Wagner-Martin breaks with tradition in this major new biography. Here we find Gertrude Stein as we have never seen her before: as a member of her German-Jewish patriarchal family, as an undergraduate at Radcliffe, as an odd sort of feminist, as a medical student at Johns Hopkins University, as a lesbian and a lover, as an art collector, as a war survivor, and much more - as a person and not just a modernist icon. Throughout, her relationship with two of her older brothers - Michael and Leo - shaped her emotional existence, just as her commitment to writing shaped her intellectual life. This fascinating portrait of Gertrude Stein's life (1874-1946) offers a rich history of "The Stein Corporation." Wagner-Martin provides new insight into the influence of Alice B. Toklas, a look into the economic side of the family's existence, and the intimate story of the Steins' relationships with Matisse, Picasso, Gris, and other painters; and later, of Gertrude Stein's relationships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Virgil Thomson, Thornton Wilder, Janet Flanner, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and many other colorful modernist writers and artists in the rue de Fleurus salon. This biography also gives us a previously untold but chilling account of Gertrude Stein's and Alice Toklas's survival during World War II in France, and Leo Stein's in Italy.

Critical-analytical study of Levertov's poetic theory and practice.

Reviews the life and work of the American writer whose "Grapes of Wrath" portrayed farmers during the Depression and won him a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize.