The Daybreak Boys

2009-06-25
 |  Literary Criticism
The Daybreak Boys

Author: Gregory Stephenson

Publisher: SIU Press

ISBN: 9780809386475

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 232

View: 938

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In these critical essays Gregory Stephenson takes the reader on a journey through the literature of the Beat Generation: a journey encompassing that common ethos of Beat literature— the passage from darkness to light, from fragmented being toward wholeness, from Beat to Beatific. He travels through Jack Kerouac’ s Duluoz Legend, following Kerouac’ s quests for identity, community, and spiritual knowledge. He examines Allen Ginsberg’ s use of transcendence in “ Howl,” discovers the Gnostic vision in William S. Burroughs’ s fiction, and studies the mythic, visionary power of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’ s poetry. Stephenson also provides detailed examinations of the writing of lesser-known Beat authors: John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Richard Fariñ a, and Michael McClure. He explores the myth and the mystery of the literary legend of Neal Cassady. The book concludes with a look at the common traits of the Beat writers— their use of primitivism, shamanism, myth and magic, spontaneity, and improvisation, all of which led them to a new idiom of consciousness and to the expansion of the parameters of American literature.

American and British Poetry: 1979-1990

1984
 |  American poetry
American and British Poetry: 1979-1990

Author: Harriet Semmes Alexander

Publisher: Athens : Ohio University Press/Swallow Press

ISBN: STANFORD:36105009629036

Category: American poetry

Page: 488

View: 837

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Includes approximately 800 British and American poets, past and present, with criticisms drawn from more than 160 journals and 300 books

Gotham

1998-11-19
 |  History
Gotham

Author: Edwin G. Burrows

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 0199741204

Category: History

Page: 1416

View: 453

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To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.

Meyer Berger's New York

2009-08-25
 |  Literary Collections
Meyer Berger's New York

Author: Meyer Berger

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

ISBN: 9780823223299

Category: Literary Collections

Page: 322

View: 727

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Meyer ("Mike") Berger was one of the greatest journalists of this century. A reporter and columnist for The New York Times for thirty years, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his account of the murder of thirteen people by a deranged war veteran in Camden, New Jersey. Berger is best known for his "About New York" column, which appeared regularly in the Times from 1939 to 1940 and from 1953 until his death in 1959. Through lovingly detailed snapshots of ordinary New Yorkers and far corners of the city, Berger's writing deeply influenced the next generation of writers, including Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. Originally published in 1960 and long out of print, Meyer Berger's New York is a rich collection of extraordinary journalism, selected by Berger himself, which captures the buzz, bravado, and heartbreak of New York in the fifties in the words of the best-loved reporter of his time. "Mike Berger was one of the great reporters of our day . . . he was a master of the color story, the descriptive narrative of sights and sounds-of a parade, an eclipse, a homicidal maniac running amok . . . or just a thunderstorm that broke a summer heat wave . . . ."-The New York Times, obituary, February 6, 1959 "Dip into Meyer Berger's New York, at any point, and you will find things you never knew or dreamed of knowing. . . . It has a heart, a soul, and a beauty all its own." -Phillip Hamburger, The New York Times Book Review