Pearson, Michael

A moving memoir, Dreaming of Columbus illuminates place as a force that shapes lives. With recollection and reportage, Michael Pearson re-creates the Bronx of the 1950s and 60s, the place of his youth, that "precisely known world, safe and claustrophobic," an Irish Catholic culture filled with light and shadows. The driving force behind Pearson's story is its people - an enigmatic father, a steadfast mother, an eccentric and influential writing teacher, the boys and girls who shared his neighborhood, the high school girl who shared his vision and his life - and the books that made escape and return seem possible.

Michael Pearson is a seeker of places, and his avenue to them is his own imagination. His quests, intense and introspective, take him to real terrains. At the terminus he always finds the universal. In this, his second book of literary odyssey, he looks to places for a way to understand his heritage. In Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America he wrote about his search to match fictional sites with the images that his reading of them had instilled in his mind. As Pearson explores, it is memory, imagination, and the rejuvenating power of literature that are his unfailing resources. His narrative journey in A Place That's Known probes the indelible locales from his past - the Bronx, where he spent his Catholic boyhood, the placid shores of Long Lake in Maine during his adolescence, and Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, where he spent a troubled time in his young manhood. He follows paths opened in the present by contemporary writers. In the Pine Barrens of New Jersey he meets John McPhee. In the Navajo country of the American Southwest he encounters Tony Hillerman. In Britain he discovers a part of himself in the landscapes of past masters - Shakespeare, Chaucer, Yeats, and Joyce. His journey ends back home in Virginia, where his young sons on the brink of their own quests make him perceive the full circle, life at the beginning where the odyssey started. Pearson's interior travelogue combines narrative, reportage, and autobiography as he reaches out for rays of light that will reveal the meaning of the search. In these poignant essays he roves over American and British landscapes and in the play of the imagination and experience discovers familiar yet transformed terrain. To him this "place that's known" is the intersection where "our soaring dreams and the hardscrabble world converge." To his readers this place is their own.

Discusses the problems and worries which beset King George III, his ministers, and generals as they struggled to crush the rebellion of American colonists.

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1933, The Store is the second novel of Stribling's monumental trilogy set in the author's native Tennessee Valley region of North Alabama. The novel's action begins in 1884, when Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the end of the Civil War, and it centers about the emergence of Colonel Miltiades Vaiden as a figure of wealth and power in the city of Florence. In The Store, Stribling succeeds in presenting the essence of an age through the everyday lives of his characters. Writing in The New Statesman and Nation upon publication of the book, Gerald Bullett stated The Store "is a first-rate book of its kind, a good story filled with diverse and vital characters; and much of it cannot be read without that primitive excitement, that eagerness to know what comes next, which is, after all, the triumph of the good story teller."

"From the author of The Sealed Train and Those Damned Rebels comes the biography of Inessa Armand: revolutionary, tactician, and confidante and mistress of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Although she is little known today, after the October Revolution in 1917, Armand became the most powerful woman in Moscow." "Michael Pearson, with access to family papers (including 150 letters from Lenin to Armand), previously censored materials from Russian archives, and interviews with Inessa Armand's descendants, brings her to life with precision and insight - as a wife and devoted mother, political standard-bearer, and woman in love."--BOOK JACKET.