Search results for ""author susan goodman""

When Edith Wharton became friends with Henry James, she joined a group of men who became her "inner circle." This group included both well-known figures, such as James, Percy Lubbock, and Bernard Berenson, and several now forgotten, including John Hugh Smith, Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Robert Norton, and Howard Sturgis.Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, Susan Goodman here presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored. She explores how the group, which began forming around 1904 and lasted until Wharton's death in 1937, defined itself against the society its founders had left in the United States, while simultaneously criticizing and accommodating the one it found in Europe. Tracing Wharton's individual relationships with these men and their relationships with one another, she examines literary kinships and movements in the biographical and feminist context of gender, exile, and aesthetics. She also relates the group to other literary circles, such as the Bloomsbury group and Gertrude Stein's salon.

Read more less

Mary Austin (1868-1934) - eccentric, independent, and unstoppable - was twenty years old when her mother moved the family west. Austin's first look at her new home, glimpsed from California's Tejon Pass, reset the course of her life, 'changed her horizons and marked the beginning of her understanding, not only about who she was, but where she needed to be.' At a time when Frederick Jackson Turner had announced the closing of the frontier, Mary Austin became the voice of the American West. In 1903, she published her first book, "The Land of Little Rain", a wholly original look at the West's desert and its ethnically diverse people. Defined in a sense by the places she lived, Austin also defined the places themselves, whether Bishop, in the Sierra Nevada, Carmel, with its itinerant community of western writers, or Santa Fe, where she lived the last ten years of her life. By the time of her death in 1934, Austin had published over thirty books and counted as friends the leading literary and artistic lights of her day. In this rich new biography, Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson explore Austin's life and achievement with unprecedented resonance, depth, and understanding. By focusing on one extraordinary woman's life, "Mary Austin and the American West" tells the larger story of the emerging importance of California and the Southwest to the American consciousness.

Read more less

Observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Lionel Trilling have found the United States wanting in what it takes to produce a novelist of manners-namely, a rich enough past and sufficiently stratified classes. In a work that recovers the broader meaning of "manners" for past generations, Susan Goodman demonstrates that American writers have consistently tied the subject of national identity to the norms and behaviors of everyday life-that, in fact, the novel of manners is a dominant form of American fiction. Goodman concentrates on a cluster of writers-William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and Jessie Fauset-whose analyses of manners offer several distinct social histories. Under her scrutiny, these writers' works allow us to view the creative interaction of individual lives, social dynamics, and historical legacies-what might be called the panorama of manners themselves-as well as the development of American fiction. Above all, Goodman shows that novels of manners are central to American literature, and that these novels speak in a large cultural way about who and what composes America.

Read more less

Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. "William Dean Howells" traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of "Atlantic Monthly". It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, 'the boss' of literary critics - his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities - Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others - "William Dean Howells" portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Read more less