Bøger af Brenda Wineapple

"In 1925, hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, where a young schoolteacher named John T. Scopes was put on trial for including a reference to evolution in his teaching. Darwin's concept that species evolved over time through natural selection was misunderstood as challenging the Bible, faith in God, and as suggesting that men were descended from monkeys. Two legendary men, Clarence Darrow for the defense, and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, drew massive crowds in a trial that quickly became a circus-like media sensation. Darrow argued for individual freedom including in religion and education, and Bryan argued from a fundamentalist Christian perspective that evolution undermined faith in God and the literal truth of the Bible. Acclaimed historian Brenda Wineapple brings to vivid life the entirety of this dramatic and colorful period that exposed foundation divisions in America across race, class, and religion. Bryan had run several times, unsuccessfully, for President, and his political efforts and ambitions, vividly chronicled in this book, culminated in Dayton. Darrow was a leader of the ACLU and known as a fervent defender of laborers, and his long history of legal defense in matters of individual rights also reached its apogee in this trial of the century. In his defense of Scopes and the First Amendment protection of individual liberty, Darrow said: 'No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry, and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America.'"--

Essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century

Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. "Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said. Hawthorne himself declared that he was not "one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. "He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, "he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein ("Luminous”-Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them-he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls. Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne's fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children's books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2013A Kirkus Best Book of 2013A Bookpage Best Book of 2013Dazzling in scope, Ecstatic Nation illuminates one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in Americas past, when the country dreamed big, craved new lands and new freedom, and was bitterly divided over its great moral wrong: slavery.With a canvas of extraordinary characters, such as P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and L. C. Q. Lamar, Ecstatic Nation brilliantly balances cultural and political history: Its a riveting account of the sectional conflict that preceded the Civil War, and it astutely chronicles the complex aftermath of that war and Reconstruction, including the promise that women would share in a newdefinition of American citizenship. It takes us from photographic surveys of the Sierra Nevadas to the discovery of gold in the South Dakota hills, and it signals the painful, thrilling birth of modern America.An epic tale by award-winning author Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation lyrically and with true originality captures the optimism, the failures, and the tragic exuberance of a renewed Republic.

The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genet. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.

Americans, expatriates, and virtually orphans, Gertrude and Leo Stein, lived together for almost forty years, collaborating in one of the great artistic and literary adventures of the twentieth century. This biography tells the story of that adventure and relationship.