The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393317688
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy by : Shelby Foote

Download or read book The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy written by Shelby Foote and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death of Foote's mother and Percy's battle with cancer, their letters are full of sly humor, good-natured ribbing, and a large dose of self-mockery.

Shelby Foote

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Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 9781578069323
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (693 download)

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Book Synopsis Shelby Foote by : C. Stuart Chapman

Download or read book Shelby Foote written by C. Stuart Chapman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography that plumbs the ambiguous life of the gentlemanly novelist and historian For a biographer Shelby Foote is a famously reluctant subject. In writing this biography, however, C. Stuart Chapman gained valuable access through interviews and shared correspondence, an advantage Foote rarely has granted to others. Born into Mississippi Delta gentry in 1916, Foote has engaged in a lifelong struggle with the realities behind his persona, the classic image of the southern gentleman. His polished civil graces mask a conflict deep within. Foote's beloved South is a changing region, and even progressive change, of which Foote approves, can be unsettling. In letters and interviews, and in his writings, he often waxes nostalgic as he grapples to recover the grace of an earlier time, particularly the era of the Civil War. Indeed, Chapman reveals that the whole of Foote's novels and historical narratives serves as a refuge from deeply ambiguous feelings. As Foote has struggled to understand the radical shifts brought to his native land by modernization and the region's integration into the nation, his personal history has been clouded by ideological conflict. This biography shows him pining for aristocratic, antebellum culture while rejecting the practices that made possible the injustices of that era. Privately and vehemently, Foote opposed George C. Wallace's and Ross Barnett's untenable segregationist stance. Yet publicly during the 1960s and '70s he skirted the explosive race issue. Foote is best known for his dazzling and definitive The Civil War: A Narrative. Written from 1954 to 1974, the three-volume opus was published during years when the South exploded with racial and political tensions and was forever changed. This biography recognizes that nowhere are Foote's personal conflicts, ambivalence, and outright contradictions more on display than in his fiction. Although Love in a Dry Season, Jordan County, and September, September are set in the contemporary South, they reach no firm social resolutions. Instead they entertain, dramatize, and come to grips with the social, gender, and racial barriers of the southern life he experienced. While showing how Foote's guarded embrace of the South's past and present characterizes his identity as a thinker, a historian, and a writer of fiction, Chapman discloses Foote's reluctance to address burning contemporary issues and his veiled desire to recall more gracious times. C. Stuart Chapman is a Massachusetts State House aide living in Jamaica Plain. His work has been published in the Clarksdale Press-Register, Memphis Business Journal, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Jamaica Plain Gazette, Modern Fiction Studies, and other publications.

Conversations with Shelby Foote

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Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 9780878053865
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (538 download)

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Book Synopsis Conversations with Shelby Foote by : Shelby Foote

Download or read book Conversations with Shelby Foote written by Shelby Foote and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1989 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews spanning thirty-seven years of the American author's career cover his feelings on the art of writing, life in the South, writers who have influenced him, and the Civil War.

Pilgrim in the Ruins

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Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 9781416552093
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Pilgrim in the Ruins by : Jay Tolson

Download or read book Pilgrim in the Ruins written by Jay Tolson and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2007-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When The Moviegoer, an extraordinary first novel by an unknown Louisiana author, won the National Book Award in 1962, it marked the arrival of an exceptional literary talent. With his five successive novels and his wide-ranging philosophical and occasional essays, Walker Percy shored up his reputation as one of America's greatest writers - an ironic moralist and perhaps the shrewdest chronicler of life in the New South. Yet even by the time of his death in 1990, little was known about this intensely private man. Based on extensive interviews, written with access to Percy's letters and manuscripts, Jay Tolson has fashioned the first major biography of the writer, an authoritative portrait that brings Percy alive as it illuminates his distinguished body of work. We see Percy's life and his brilliant career against the background of the American South, whose colorful and tragic history is rooted deeply in the hearts and minds of its most talented sons and daughters. With a novelist's eye for character and the judgment of an informed critic, Tolson captures the lifelong drama of genius, always attentive to its artistic, psychological and spiritual dimensions. Percy was the scion of a proud, honorable and accomplished family, a clan haunted by a crippling streak of melancholy that issued repeatedly in suicides, including the self-inflicted deaths of Walker Percy's father and grandfather. Tolson depicts the struggle of Percy's life and the heroism with which he battled his family demons (and his own tubercular condition) and worked his way toward a writing career. Here is the young Percy in the days after his father's death, traveling with his brother and his mother (who would soon dieherself, in mysterious circumstances) from his childhood home of Birmingham, Alabama, to Athens, Georgia, and then on to Greenville, Mississippi, and the sprawling house of his Uncle Will. Adopted at 16 by this remarkable "bachelor-poet-lawyer-planter", the most important single influence on the future author's life, Percy came to maturity in what he later described as an "all-male household visited regularly by other poets, politicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, black preachers, folk singers, Civil Rights leaders and itinerant guitar players". We follow Percy as he travels north to New York, where he attended medical school and - with the help of a psychiatrist - began to make sense of his complex family legacy. Tolson details Percy's movement toward the Catholic Church, his first struggles as a writer, his early involvement with the publishing world, the steady support of his friend and fellow writer Shelby Foote, and a demanding apprenticeship under the supervision of the gifted novelist Caroline Gordon and her husband, the late Allen Tate. Percy emerged an altogether distinctive writer: a Catholic artist who, like Flannery O'Connor, worked in a predominantly Protestant culture; an heir to the literary traditions of the Southern Renaissance who adopted the strategies of modern European fiction and philosophy to forge his own narrative art. Tolson guides us through the creation of both the unpublished and published novels - from The Charterhouse through The Thanatos Syndrome - as well as the philosophical works that underlie and complement Percy's fiction. The biographer shows us how the demands of his work were eased by rich friendships, including those with fellow writers ThomasMerton, Eudora Welty and Robert Coles. We learn also about a marriage of abiding strength, and of the love and care that Percy and his wife Bunt gave to the raising of their two daughters, one of them all but deaf from birth. Above all, we see the man in all his shifting moods, "the gracious, easy, almost avuncular manner straining against a powerful, furious intensity, an almost furious energy". Here is the dark tragedy, the humor, and the hard-earned wisdom of a life whose outward calm concealed an internal drama - an unrelenting fight against hopelessness and despair. Percy's story is that of a writer and moralist who made enduring art out of his search for truth.

Walker Percy Remembered

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807877484
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Walker Percy Remembered by : David Horace Harwell

Download or read book Walker Percy Remembered written by David Horace Harwell and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2007-09-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walker Percy (1916-1990), the reclusive southern author most famous for his 1961 novel The Moviegoer, spent much of his adult life in Covington, Louisiana. In the spirit of traditional southern storytelling, this biography of Percy takes its shape from candid interviews with his family, close friends, and acquaintances. In thirteen interviews, we get to know Percy through his lifelong friend Shelby Foote, Percy's brothers LeRoy and Phin, his former priest, his housekeeper, and former teachers, among others--all in their own words. Over the course of the interviews, readers learn intimate details of Percy's writing process; his interaction with community members of different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds; and his commitment to civil rights issues. What emerges is a multidimensional portrait of Percy as a man, a friend, and a family member.

Tournament

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Publisher : Summa Publications, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 9780917786563
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (865 download)

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Book Synopsis Tournament by : Shelby Foote

Download or read book Tournament written by Shelby Foote and published by Summa Publications, Inc.. This book was released on 1987 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tournament is Shelby Foote's first novel, published originally by Dial Press in 1949. Summa's reprint includes an exclusive preface by the author concerning his literary deveopment and the genesis of Tournament and an introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., the dean of American literature criticism. Tournament is a brilliant novel of the post-Civil War South, replete with Proustian and Faulknerian overtones. Many of the characters that appear in subsequent novels by Shelby Foote come onto the scene for the first time in this work. It is a must acquisition for every fan of Shelby Foote--From item description.

The Moviegoer

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Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1453216251
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (532 download)

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Book Synopsis The Moviegoer by : Walker Percy

Download or read book The Moviegoer written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.

Love in a Dry Season

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307779254
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis Love in a Dry Season by : Shelby Foote

Download or read book Love in a Dry Season written by Shelby Foote and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shelby Foote's magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy, rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy. Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families—the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses—are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites. Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command of the grotesque, Foote's novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh—and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition.

Mirrorwork

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Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780805057102
Total Pages : 580 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (571 download)

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Book Synopsis Mirrorwork by : Salman Rushdie

Download or read book Mirrorwork written by Salman Rushdie and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories and excerpts of novels from India since the country attained its independence in 1947. The subjects range from religious strife, to the assault on the senses of the many people one is surrounded by.

Wolf

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 046502503X
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (65 download)

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Book Synopsis Wolf by : James L. Haley

Download or read book Wolf written by James L. Haley and published by . This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning western historian James L. Haley paints a vivid portrait of Jack London--adventurer, social reformer, and the most popular American writer of his generation

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

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Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780374529215
Total Pages : 596 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (292 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life You Save May Be Your Own by : Paul Elie

Download or read book The Life You Save May Be Your Own written by Paul Elie and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-03-10 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elie tells the story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God: Thomas Merton; Dorothy Day; Walker Percy; and Flannery OConnor.

The Summer of ’63 Gettysburg

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Publisher : Savas Beatie
ISBN 13 : 1954547048
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (545 download)

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Book Synopsis The Summer of ’63 Gettysburg by : Chris Mackowski

Download or read book The Summer of ’63 Gettysburg written by Chris Mackowski and published by Savas Beatie. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An outstanding read for anyone interested in the Civil War and Gettysburg in particular . . . innovative and thoughtful ideas on seemingly well-covered events.” —The NYMAS Review The largest land battle on the North American continent has maintained an unshakable grip on the American imagination. Building on momentum from a string of victories that stretched back into the summer of 1862, Robert E. Lee launched his Confederate Army of Northern Virginia on an invasion of the North meant to shake Union resolve and fundamentally shift the dynamic of the war. His counterpart with the Federal Army of the Potomac, George Meade, elevated to command just days before the fighting, found himself defending his home state in a high-stakes battle that could have put Confederates at the very gates of the nation’s capital. The public historians writing for the popular Emerging Civil War blog, speaking on its podcast, or delivering talks at the annual Emerging Civil War Symposium at Stevenson Ridge in Virginia always present their work in ways that engage and animate audiences. Their efforts entertain, challenge, and sometimes provoke readers with fresh perspectives and insights born from years of working on battlefields, guiding tours, presenting talks, and writing for the wider Civil War community. The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg is a compilation of some of their favorites, anthologized, revised, and updated, together with several original pieces. Each entry includes original and helpful illustrations. Along with its companion volume The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg and Tullahoma, this important study contextualizes the major 1863 campaigns in what was arguably the Civil War’s turning-point summer.

Lanterns On The Levee

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Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307820270
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Lanterns On The Levee by : William Alexander Percy

Download or read book Lanterns On The Levee written by William Alexander Percy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-09-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885–1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life—although his life was exciting and varied—but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy—Will's nephew and adopted son—recalls the strong character and easy grace of "the most extraordinary man I have ever known."

For the Sake of Argument

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Publisher : Verso
ISBN 13 : 9780860914358
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (143 download)

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Book Synopsis For the Sake of Argument by : Christopher Hitchens

Download or read book For the Sake of Argument written by Christopher Hitchens and published by Verso. This book was released on 1993 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'For the sake of argument, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.'. The global turmoil of the last few years has severely tested every analyst and commentator. Few have written with such insight as Christopher Hitchens about the large events - or with such discernment and with about the small tell-tale signs of a disordered culture. For the Sake of Argument ranges from the political squalor of Washington, as a beleaguered Bush administration seeks desperately to stave off disaster and Clinton prepares for power, to the twilight of Stalinism in Prague; from the Jewish quarter of Damascus in the aftermath of the Gulf War to the embattled barrios of Central America and the imperishable resistance of Saralevo, as a difficult peace is negotiated with ruthless foes. Hitchens' unsparing account of Western realpolitik in the end shows it to rest on delusion as well as deception. The reader will find in these pages outstanding essays on political asassination in America as well as a scathing review of the evisceration of politics by pollsters and spin-doctors. Hitchens' knowledge of the tortuous history of revolutions in the twentieth century helps him to explain both the New York intelligentsia's flirtation with Trotskyism and the frailty of Communist power structures in Eastern Europe. Hitchens' pointed reassessments of Graham Greene, P.G. Wodehouse and C.L.R. James, or his riotous celebration of drinkiny and smoking, display an engaging enthusiasm and an acerbic wit. Equally entertaining is his unsparing rogues' gallery, which gives us unforgettable portraits of the lugubrious 'Dr'Kissinger, the comprehensively reactionary 'Mother' Teresa, the preposterous Paul Johnson and the predictable P.J. O'Rourke.

Battle Cry of Freedom

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199726582
Total Pages : 946 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis Battle Cry of Freedom by : James M. McPherson

Download or read book Battle Cry of Freedom written by James M. McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-12-11 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War--the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry--and then moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself--the battles, the strategic maneuvering on both sides, the politics, and the personalities. Particularly notable are McPherson's new views on such matters as the slavery expansion issue in the 1850s, the origins of the Republican Party, the causes of secession, internal dissent and anti-war opposition in the North and the South, and the reasons for the Union's victory. The book's title refers to the sentiments that informed both the Northern and Southern views of the conflict: the South seceded in the name of that freedom of self-determination and self-government for which their fathers had fought in 1776, while the North stood fast in defense of the Union founded by those fathers as the bulwark of American liberty. Eventually, the North had to grapple with the underlying cause of the war--slavery--and adopt a policy of emancipation as a second war aim. This "new birth of freedom," as Lincoln called it, constitutes the proudest legacy of America's bloodiest conflict. This authoritative volume makes sense of that vast and confusing "second American Revolution" we call the Civil War, a war that transformed a nation and expanded our heritage of liberty.

Lighting Out for the Territory

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 9781439101377
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Lighting Out for the Territory by : Roy Jr. Morris

Download or read book Lighting Out for the Territory written by Roy Jr. Morris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before. It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war. A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun. With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away. With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

Love in the Ruins

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Author :
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1453216200
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (532 download)

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Book Synopsis Love in the Ruins by : Walker Percy

Download or read book Love in the Ruins written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIV“A great adventure . . . So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless.” —Chicago Sun Times/divDIV/divDIVIn Walker Percy’s future America, the country is on the brink of disaster. With citizens violently polarized along racial, political, and social lines, and a fifteen-year war still raging abroad, America is crumbling quickly into ruin. The country’s one remaining hope is Dr. Thomas More, whose “lapsometer” is capable of diagnosing the spiritual afflictions—anxiety, depression, alienation—driving everyone’s destructive and disastrous behavior./divDIV /divDIVBut such a potent machine has its pitfalls. As Dr. More soon learns, in the wrong hands, the powerful lapsometer could lead to open warfare, pushing America into anarchy at full-speed./div /div