Biography

Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space
By Peter I. Rose

Peter Rose has spent a lifetime exploring patterns of culture, examining issues of race and ethnicity, working with refugees, teaching sociology, and roaming the world. In Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space, he reflects on his adventures and the formative experiences that led him to a fascination with lives that seem quite unlike our own.

The River Home
A Memoir
By Dorothy Weil

The death of her father begins Dorothy Weil’s search for what causes the family’s “spinning of in all directions like the pieces of Chaos.” She embarks on a river odyssey, traveling the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers by steamboat, towboat, and even an old-fashioned flatboat. The river brings her family back, as she records the stories of her fellow “river rats”: steamboat veterans, deckhands, captains, and cooks.

Edmund Wilson, the Man in Letters
By Edmund Wilson
· Edited by David Castronovo and Janet Groth

Among the major writers of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald generation, Edmund Wilson defied categorization. He wrote essays, stories and novels, cultural criticism, and contemporary chronicles, as well as journals and thousands of letters about the literary life and his own private world. Here for the first time in print is Wilson's personal correspondence to his parents, lovers and wives, children, literary comrades, and friends from the different corners of his life.

Maverick Heart
The Further Adventures of Zane Grey
By Stephen J. May

In 1927, at the peak of his career, Zane Grey bought a three-masted schooner, which he sailed to the Galapagos Islands, later journeying to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. As colorful as his characters were, so too was their creator. A consummate explorer, Zane Grey toured the world, was an acclaimed expert on salt- and freshwater fishing, and incorporated the sights and sounds he witnessed into his writings.

Stolen Life
The Journey of a Cree Woman
By Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson

The award-winning Stolen Life is a remarkable collaborative work between a distinguished novelist and a Cree woman who broke a lifetime of silence to share her story. Imprisoned for murder at the age of twenty-seven, Yvonne Johnson sought out Rudy Wiebe, the chronicler of her ancestor Big Bear, as a means of coming to terms with her self, her past, and the crime that defines her future.

Amy Levy
Her Life and Letters
By Linda Hunt Beckman

After a century of critical neglect, poet and writer Amy Levy is gaining recognition as a literary figure of stature. This definitive biography accompanied by her letters, along with the recent publication of her selected writings, provides a critical appreciation of Levy's importance in her own time and in ours.

Set the Ploughshare Deep
A Prairie Memoir
By Timothy Murphy

Fifteen years in the making, Set the Ploughshare Deep is a memoir in prose, verse, and woodcuts. It depicts the consequences of Warren's advice for a writer who turned his back on cities and the academic world, who bought and sold, farmed and failed like his forebears, all the while distilling what he saw, heard, or felt into his tall tales and short verses. Timothy Murphy has harvested pheasants and ducks as well as wheat and apples.

Staking Her Claim
The Life of Belinda Mulrooney, Klondike and Alaska Entrepreneur
By Melanie J. Mayer and Robert N. DeArmond

If Horatio Alger had imagined a female heroine in the same mold as one of the young male heroes in his rags-to-riches stories, she would have looked like Belinda Mulrooney. Smart, ambitious, competitive, and courageous, Belinda Mulrooney was destined through her legendary pioneering in the wilds of the Yukon basin to found towns and many businesses. She built two fortunes, supported her family, was an ally to other working women, and triumphed in what was considered a man's world.

Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits
War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97
By Heike Behrend

In August 1986, Alice Auma, a young Acholi woman in northern Uganda, proclaiming herself under the orders of a Christian spirit named Lakwena, raised an army called the “Holy Spirit Mobile Forces.” With it she waged a war against perceived evil, not only an external enemy represented by the National Resistance Army of the government, but internal enemies in the form of “impure” soldiers, witches, and sorcerers.

Divine Expectations
An American Woman in Nineteenth-Century Palestine
By Barbara Kreiger

Barbara Kreiger's intriguing narrative presents the account of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the Second Coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine. After her disappointment in a failed prophecy that the End of Days would take place in October 1844, Mrs.

Soliloquy of a Farmer’s Wife
The Diary of Annie Elliott Perrin
Edited by Dale B. J. Randall

Diary of a Geneva, Ohio, farmer’s wife, Annie Perrin, who wrote during the final battles, climax, and close of World War I.

With Gissing in Italy
The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne
Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

A candid portrait of one of England's most celebrated authors In 1897, at age nineteen, American Brian Ború Dunne was an aspiring journalist, who chanced to meet the Englishman George Gissing at the height of his career as a novelist. He was somewhat awed, but not unduly intimidated, by the renowned writer, and his vigorous personality drew Gissing into many frank and unguarded conversations.

A Paris Year
Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932
By Edgar Marquess Branch

The Depression that follows the 1929 stock market crash is emptying Paris of many American expatriates. Two exceptions are Dorothy and James T. Farrell, the naïve young couple who have fled their home in Chicago for the fabled liberation that Paris seems to offer. In this telling account drawn from interviews, diaries, and letters home, Edgar Marquess Branch presents a composite view of the life of a young author yet to complete his masterpiece, Studs Lonigan.

Dared & Done
The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
By Julia Markus

Based extensively on their writings and letters to each other, this chronicle of Elizabeth Barrett's and Robert Browning's life together stands in bold relief against the backdrop of their Victorian world. Their passionate partnership overcame any number of obstacles — Elizabeth's role in her father's family; her illness; her Creole background; Robert's tentative career — to culminate in a marriage of mutual devotion.

Brave Are My People
Indian Heroes Not Forgotten
By Frank Waters

Pontiac, Sequoyah, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Chief Seattle. These legendary names are familiar even to the uninitiated in Native American history, yet the life stories of these great spiritual leaders have been largely unknown. In this, his last book, internationally celebrated author Frank Waters makes vivid the poignant, humorous, and tragic stories of these neglected and heroic Native Americans.