An authoritative, captivating exploration of a literary landmark.
In-depth study of the historical, cultural, and sociological significance of the enduring American classic.
In 1915, Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) published Spoon River Anthology, a collection of free verse epitaphs taken from a cemetery in the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois. Stacy, a professor of history and sociology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, begins by discussing the romanticized myth of rural America that began in New England before moving on to discuss the political and cultural history of the Midwest in which the anthology took shape. Next, Stacy incisively examines the text itself, identifying the “familiar literary types that fueled the book’s popularity: the materialistic, hypocritical elite; the soil-bound, exploited populist; and the skeptical community exile.” The reception for Spoon River Anthology was mostly celebratory, but parodies also arose, with scrutiny of a “poetic form by which universal foibles could be explored through individual plight—in these cases, for humorous ends.” Some critics characterized Masters and a few of his contemporaries as “village rebels,” writers working at the edges of “a culture war between the traditional and the modern.” Masters responded to these criticisms in a 1939 interview. “I didn’t revolt against my village. The best years of my life were spent back there in Illinois,” he said, while acknowledging that his work, as Stacy notes, “appeared at a time when readers sought a reformulation of the village myth.” The author engagingly tracks the shifting concept of small-town America through the 20th century as writers, filmmakers, and other artists continued to find inspiration in the anthology. Eventually, the text entered high school classrooms, and teachers invited students “to meditate on their own lives.” Around the turn of the millennium, Stacy notes, media began to portray small towns “as places where the surreal and freakish happened.” The author cites Twin Peaks, Pleasantville, and Stranger Things as instructive examples. And so the myth continues, as does the anthology’s influence, brought appealingly to life by Stacy.
An authoritative, captivating exploration of a literary landmark.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-252-08582-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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