Letters

Home Front to Battlefront
An Ohio Teenager in World War II
By Frank Lavin
· Foreword by Henry Kissinger

Home Front to Battlefront contributes the rich details of one soldier’s experience to the broader literature on World War II, offering insight into the wartime career of a Jewish Ohioan in the military from enlistment to training through overseas deployment via personal letters, recollections, official military history, and more.

491 Days
Prisoner Number 1323/69
By Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
· Foreword by Ahmed Kathrada

On a freezing winter’s night, a few hours before dawn on May 12, 1969, South African security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, activist and wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and arrested her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged nine and ten. Rounded up in a group of other antiapartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away.

The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle
By Henry Northrup Castle
· Edited by George Herbert Mead and Helen Castle Mead
· Introduction by Alfred L. Castle
· Foreword by Marvin Krislov

Castle’s correspondence with family members and with George Herbert Mead— one of America’s most influential philosophers and his best friend at Oberlin College—reveals many of the intellectual, economic, and cultural forces that shaped American thought.

The Untried Life
The Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War
By James T. Fritsch

Told in unflinching detail, this is the story of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, also known as the Giddings Regiment or the Abolition Regiment, after its founder, radical abolitionist Congressman J. R. Giddings. The men who enlisted in the Twenty- Ninth OVI were, according to its lore, handpicked to ensure each was as pure in his antislavery beliefs as its founder.

Do They Miss Me at Home?
The Civil War Letters of William McKnight, Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry
Edited by Donald C. Maness and H. Jason Combs

William McKnight was a member of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry from September 1862 until his death in June of 1864. During his time of service, McKnight penned dozens of emotion-filled letters, primarily to his wife, Samaria, revealing the struggles of an entire family both before and during the war.

Wanted—Correspondence
Women’s Letters to a Union Soldier
Edited by Nancy L. Rhoades and Lucy E. Bailey

A unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War offers glimpses of women’s lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front.

DeVoto’s West
History, Conservation, and the Public Good
By Bernard DeVoto
· Edited by Edward K. Muller

Social commentator and preeminent western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. By the time of his death in 1955, DeVoto had published criticism, history, and fiction. He had won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. But his most passionate writing—at once incisive and eloquent—advocated conservation of America’s prairies, rangeland, forests, mountains, canyons, and deserts.

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.

Lord of a Visible World
An Autobiography in Letters
By H. P. Lovecraft
· Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz

In Lord of a Visible World, the editors have amassed and arranged the letters of this prolific writer into the story of his life. The volume traces Lovecraft's upbringing in Providence, Rhode Island, his involvement with the pulp magazine Weird Tales, his short-lived marriage, and his later status as the preeminent man of letters in his field. In addition to conveying the candid details of his life, the volume also traces the evolution of his wide-ranging opinions.

The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters
By Yvor Winters
· Edited by R. L. Barth

Poet, teacher, and critic, Yvor Winters was a man of letters in more ways than one. This selection of his personal correspondence spans half a century of literary history and a lifetime of intellectual development and growth. As a record of a serious artist and thinker's grappling with important issues and, sometimes, with his notable friends, the letters offer new and often unexpected insight into the creative mind at work.

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.

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.

Good-Bye to Old Peking
The Wartime Letters of U.S. Marine Captain John Seymour Letcher, 1937–1939
Edited by Katie Letcher Lyle and Roger B. Jeans

For two and a half years (1937-1939), Captain John Seymour Letcher commanded a company of the U.S. Embassy Marine Guard in Peking. During that time, he wrote a series of letters to his parents in Virginia describing the life of a Westerner in the former imperial city. During that same time, China was invaded by Japan.

Lionel Sotheby’s Great War
Diaries and Letters from the Western Front
By Lionel Sotheby
· Edited by Donald C. Richter
· Introduction by Donald C. Richter
· Foreword by Peter H. Liddle

The “butterfly” that emerged in World War I trench warfare in 1915 aspired to kill: “I cannot explain,” the diary continues. “It comes unseen and makes you oblivious of almost everything at times, save one intense desire to kill, kill, kill, the Germans.” Lionel Sotheby’s diary and letters are a compelling first-person account of the harrowing experiences of the young British lieutenant at the Western Front. His writing reveals constant peril, hourly discomfort, and gruesome injuries.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 9
1902–1903
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

This ninth volume concludes the widely-acclaimed edition of The Collected Letters of George Gissing, which not only renders obsolete all other collections and selections of his letters, but also contains a considerable quantity of hitherto unpublished or inaccessible materials.