Biography

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.As

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.

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.In

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 authorsIn 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.

R. F. D.
Charles Allen Smart
By Charles Allen Smart
· Foreword by Gene Logsdon

The classic story of a 1930s transplanted New Yorker in the rural Midwest.

Arrows of Longing
The Correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Felix Pollak, 1952–1976
By Gregory H. Mason

In the winter of 1951-52, Anaïs Nin was a writer in despair. More than a dozen publishing houses had rejected her new novel, A Spy in the House of Love, and Nin became desperate for literary acceptance. Encouragement came from an unexpected source. Felix Pollak, an Austrian emigré and Rare Book Librarian at Northwestern University, had been entrusted with the task of acquiring some of Nin’s manuscripts for the library.

Recollections of Anaïs Nin
By Her Contemporaries
Edited by Benjamin Franklin V

Recollections of Anaïs Nin presents Nin through the eyes of twenty-six people who knew her. She is the unconventional, distant aunt; the thoughtful friend; the owner of a strangely disarming voice; the author eager for attention yet hypersensitive to criticism; the generous advisor to a literary magazine; the adulteress; the beautiful septuagenarian; the recommender of books—the contributors elaborate on thses and many other perceptions of Nin.Readers

Booking Pleasures
By Jack Matthews

“The covetous foraging for old and rare books,” is how Matthews defines “booking.” It is an act which leads naturally to the pleasures of adding them to one’s personal library, then reading them as instruments of light and measure in a murky and chaotic world.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 7
1897–1899
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

Gissing’s career, which spanned the period of about 1877 to his death in 1903, was characterized by prodigious output (almost a novel a year in the early days), modest recognition, and modest income. He wrote of poverty, socialism, class differences, social reform, and later on, about the problems of women and industrialization.

Sometimes I’m Happy
A Writer’s Memoir
By Marshall Sprague

Marshall Spragues colorful lifetime spanned the century like a mountain rainbow. Somewhere between the time he learned the true function of the umbrella stand in the Midwest Victorian household of his youth and his first solo train ride to New York City, he surrendered to an innate talent and inquisitiveness that subsequently engaged tens of thousands of his friends and readers. He played the Tiger Rag with a Princeton band on transatlantic steamer crossings.

S. L. Frank
The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950
By Philip Boobbyer

“There are many reasons for writing a biography of Semyon Frank. Quite apart from his philosophy, he lived a remarkable life. Born in Moscow in 1877, he was exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922 and died in London in 1950. The son of a Jewish doctor, he became a revolutionary Social Democrat in his teens and finished his life as a Neoplatonist Christian.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 6
1895-1897
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

Gissing’s career, which spanned the period of about 1877 to his death in 1903, was characterized by prodigious output (almost a novel a year in the early days), modest recognition, and modest income. He wrote of poverty, socialism, class differences, social reform, and later on, about the problems of women and industrialization.

Seven Years Among Prisoners of War
By Chris Christiansen

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were incarcerated in camp around the world during World War II. And individuals from all walks of life joined international organizations like the Red Cross, churches, and other religious groups to help counter the hopelessness of camp life.

Recollections of Virginia Woolf
By Joan Russell Noble

In the words of its editor, “This book is not intended to provide an assessment of Virginia Woolf’s work. A great deal has already been written about her novels and critical essays. It is concerned essentially with Virginia Woolf herself: about whom little has been said in print. It has been written by people who knew her either intimately as relations and friends, or who met her from time to time over a period of years and were acquaintances.

To Possess the Land
A Biography of Arthur Rochford Manby
By Frank Waters

Ambitious and only 24 years old, Arthur Manby arrived from England in the Territory of New Mexico in 1883, and saw in its wilderness an empire that he believed himself destined to rule. For his kingdom, he chose a vast Spanish land grant near Taos, a wild 100,000 acres whose ancient title was beyond question. Obsessed, he poured more than 20 years into his dream of glory, and schemed, stole, lied, cajoled, begged, and bribed to take the vast grant from its rightful owners.

George Montague Wheeler
The Man and the Myth
By Doris O. Dawdy

Until Dawdy’s “The Wyant Diary” appeared in Arizona and the West in 1980, it was virtually unknown that Lt. Wheeler was the leader of the government exploring party from which artist A. H. Wyant returned with a paralyzed arm. So little used were government reports prior to the mid-twentieth century that not one of the writers and compilers of information about this prominent artist, known to have been with a military expedition, had looked at the most likely report, that of Lt.

Suicide or Murder?
The Strange Death of Governor Meriwether Lewis
By Vardis Fisher

The death of Meriwether Lewis is one of the great mysteries of American history. Was he murdered at Grinder’s Stand or did he commit suicide? Vardis Fisher meticulously reconstructs the events and presents his own version of the case with the precision and persuasiveness of a fine trial lawyer. But Fisher was also a great novelist and it is his sense of character that serves him best here.

Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory
By Marc Becker

José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian political theorist of the 1920s, was instrumental in developing an indigenous Latin American revolutionary Marxist theory. He rejected a rigid, orthodox interpretation of Marxism and applied his own creative elements, which he believed could move a society to revolutionary action without the society having to depend upon more traditional economic factors.

Edwin L. Kennedy
Reinvesting In Education
By David Neal Keller

Wall Street investment bankers who have built careers on reputations of integrity resent the Boeskys, Milkens, and Keatings of their professions even more than the rest of us do. This biography records the life of a man who has contributed significantly to the soundness of our nation’s financial systems without contributing to that industry’s scandalous headlines: Edwin L. Kennedy.Born

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 3
1886–1888
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

For many years, the only Gissing letters available to the public were those in the modest selection of letters to his family published in 1927. In the following years a good number were published separately in such places as journals, memoirs, and sales catalogues, but like the single and small groups of unpublished letters scattered in libraries around the world, they remained in practical terms inaccessible.

Tales Never Told Around the Campfire
True Stories of Frontier America
By Mark Dugan

Ten outlaws, ten states, ten stories of nineteenth-century fugitives remarkable because the events really took place. Mark Dugan’s latest outlaw chase reins in enough evidence to corral the cynics. There is new information on the strange relationship between Wild Bill Hickok, his enemy and victim, David McCanles, and the beautiful Sarah Shull of North Carolina. Was Tom Horn a hired killer for the big cattlemen in the unsolved Wyoming ambush? How much do we really know about Deputy U.S.

Rare Book Lore
Selections from the Letters of Ernest J. Wessen
By Ernest J. Wessen
· Edited by Jack Matthews

Ernest J. Wessen was one of the legendary rare bookmen of the mid-twentieth century, and his letters, like his famous catalogs, Midland Notes, are a treasure of Americana.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 2
1881–1885
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

For many years, the only Gissing letters available to the public were those in the modest selection of letters to his family published in 1927. In the following years a good number were published separately in such places as journals, memoirs, and sales catalogues, but like the single and small groups of unpublished letters scattered in libraries around the world, they remained in practical terms inaccessible.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 1
1863–1880
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

For many years, the only Gissing letters available to the public were those in the modest selection of letters to his family published in 1927. In the following years a good number were published separately in such places as journals, memoirs, and sales catalogues, but like the single and small groups of unpublished letters scattered in libraries around the world, they remained in practical terms inaccessible.

Mafeking Diary
A Black Man’s View of a White Man’s War
By Sol T. Plaatje
· Edited by John L. Comaroff

“Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary is a document of enduring importance and fascination. The product of a young black South African court interpreter, just turned 23 years old when he started writing, it opens an entirely new vista on the famous Siege of Mafeking.

Written in Water
The Life of Benjamin Harrison Eaton
By Jane E. Norris

Much of the nineteenth-century western history comes to life in the retelling of the Benjamin Eaton story. The excitement of the 1859 Gold Rush, the ill-fated Baker expedition into the San Juans, the Civil War of the West at Valverde and Glorietta Pass, the 1864 Indian uprisings along the Platte River Trail, and the valiant struggles of the Union Colonist in 1870 are among the events interwoven in his memorable life.Irrigation

Blake Edwards
By Peter Lehman and William Luhr

Until the extraordinary critical and commercial success of “10,” Blake Edwards was mostly known as the director of the immensely popular Pink Panther films. The character of Inspector Clouseau, as played by Peter Sellers, has, in the estimation of some critics, joined the ranks of such classic comic personae as Chaplin’s tramp and Keaton’s stone-faced clown.