|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Susan GoodmanProfessor and H. Fletcher Brown Chair of Humanities William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life with Susan Goodman (University of California Press, 2005) William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was a consummate man of letters. Novelist, poet, playwright, memoirist, and critic, this author of well over a hundred books also edited the leading magazine of his day, the Atlantic Monthly (1871-1881) and served on the staff of Harper's ("The Editor's Study," 1886-1892, and "The Editor's Easy Chair," 1900-1920). The years following the Civil War have been called the Age of Howells, and perhaps no one has had more influence in the shaping of American letters. Not only did he sway the tastes, values, and mores of a growing middle-class readership toward more realistic depictions of life, he also brokered literary reputations. Howells possessed an almost unassailable authority, and over three decades of exercising in equal measure ruthlessness and charm, he shaped a canon of American literature that largely continues today.
Our biography, the first comprehensive biography in fifty years, takes new approaches to Howells’ life, work, and thought. It places Howells in broad contexts of American literature, race relations, publishing circumstances, and literary friendships, many of which were international. Reviews What Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson accomplish, I hasten to say, is a deft depiction of the author and his era. ... This impeccably researched and well-written biography shows an America in which the arts played a vital role that is no longer recognized."--New York Sun, Best Books of the Year, Biography "The first full-force scholarly biography in decades. . . . Respectful and even reverent, [it] is easily the best that Howells has received."--Adam Gopnik, New Yorker "Vivid, judicious, sympathetic to its subject and sensitive to the historical context, their biography provides a compelling introduction to the Howells. It also challenges those who think they know him well by revising the standard critical account at crucial points."--London Review of Books Current Research My current project, written with Carl Dawson, is a biography of Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934). Its unstated plot is the emerging importance of California to the national consciousness. Our individual chapters focus on both places and topics, beginning with her family’s homesteading near Bakersfield California; her marriage and move to the Owens Valley, where she began publishing (1892-1900); her life in Independence, California (1900-1904) and fight to stop Los Angeles’s appropriation of the Owens River; her founding of an artists’ colony in Carmel, California (1904-1907); her determination to see England and Italy after being told she had a year to live (1907-1910); her miraculous recovery from cancer, move to New York City, and involvement with the Little Theater Movement (1911-1914); her work as a propagandist during the First World War (1914-1919) and her friendships with politicians, notably Herbert Hoover; her lecture tours of the United States; her advocacy of American Indian causes and arts (1920-1924); and her final decade in Santa Fe, where she founded the Spanish Colonial Arts League, while continuing to write novels, write books on religion and the nature of “genius,” collect native songs and chants, and produce plays. For more information, see the English Department's faculty profile for Susan Goodman. |
|||||||||||||||
|
