ISSUE: Summer 1987
In 1904, after an absence of more than 20 years, Henry James returned to America and spent a year in the much changed country before returning to his adopted home of England. The result of this visit was a book James was tempted to call “The Return of the Native,” but the alienation caused by his absence resulted in his choosing instead The American Scene. This book, first published by the English house of Chapman and Hall in 1907, offers a Jamesian picture of turn-of-the-century America. A new edition of The American Scene was published recently by St. Martin’s [$16.95 cloth]. James A. Miller’s Running in Place: Inside the Senate, with an introduction by pundit George F. Will, is now available as a Touchstone Book [$6.95]. Another recent Touchstone Book is Charles M. Haar and Daniel Wm. Fessler’s Fairness and Justice: Law in the Service of Equality, a reexamination of our legal and political heritage [$9.95]. Rudy Behlmer’s Inside Warner Bros. (1935—1951) describes “the battles, the brainstorms, and the bickering—from the files of Hollywood’s greatest studio” and was recently reissued as a Fireside Book [$8.95]. Kentucky has come out with a new edition of Lowell H. Harrison’s The Civil War in Kentucky, which the Journal of American History lauded as a “compact, judicious account” of America’s bloodiest war in the Bluegrass state [$12.00 cloth]. Bison Books is offering a paper edition of Agnes Dean Cameron’s The New North: An Account of a Woman’s 1908 Journey through Canada to the Arctic [$9.95]. Delmore Schwartz’ The Ego Is Always at the Wheel, edited with an introduction by Robert Phillips, a collection of bagatelles ranging from such topics as the taking of baths to the importance of an automobile, has been reissued as a New Directions Paperbook [$8.95]. Perennial Library has come out with a new edition of The Language of Nuclear War: An Intelligent Citizen’s Dictionary, a work compiled by Eric Semler, James Benjamin, and Adam Gross [$9.95].
Considered one of the great emperors of Rome, Marcus Aurelius ruled from A.D. 161—180, and his reign marked the end of the golden age of the Roman Empire. The standard work on this Roman emperor appeared more than two decades ago under the simple title Marcus Aurelius: A Biography and was written by Anthony Birley, a preeminent classical scholar. Now Yale has published a substantially revised edition of the original Little, Brown classic. Birley draws extensively from the scholarship of the last twenty years to recount the story of the philosopher-emperor, whose Meditations became a book whose popularity has lasted to the present [$25.00 cloth]. When Willard Randall’s A Little Revenge: Benjamin Franklin & His Son was first published in 1984, historian Arthur Link said of this account of the founding father and his bastard son William, “this is a major work about two of the most important men in American history. . . .beautifully and dramatically written and tells a sad and poignant story.” Little, Brown, the original publisher, is now offering a paper edition of A Little Revenge [$12.95]. R.C. Bald’s John Donne: A Life was acclaimed by Dame Helen Gardner at the time of its initial publication in 1970 as “a book that will never be superseded. It will remain the fundamental biographical study on which all subsequent attempts to interpret Donne’s life and work will securely rest.” Oxford has now reissued Bald’s biography of the 17th-century poet [$29.95 paper]. Scribner’s has reprinted Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, edited by Perkins’ colleague John Hall Wheelock, with a preface by Perkins’ author Marcia Davenport [$10.95 paper]. St. Martin’s has a new edition of The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen, Danish poet Thorkild Bjørnvig’s memoirs of his association with Baroness Blixen, with whom he broke after an intense relationship of five years [$8.95 paper]. Touchstone Books has republished Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman’s Breaking the Silence, a biography of Eduard Schulte, the German industrialist who first exposed to the Allies the horrifying news that Hitler’s extermination of the Jews had begun [$8.95]. Now available as an Owl Book is Ulick O’Connor’s All The Olympians: A Biographical Portrait of the Irish Literary Renaissance, involving such figures as W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Synge [$10.95]. W. Jackson Bate’s critical biography titled Coleridge first appeared in 1968 and is again available in a paper edition from Harvard [$10.95]. Cornell has come out with a paper edition of Nancy B. Reich’s Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, a life of one of the most remarkable women of the 19th century [$9.95 paper]. Perennial Library is offering a paper edition of Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, which the New York Post described as “the saga of a truly American family blended from slaves, slave-owning whites, Cherokee Indians, free-born Negroes and possibly some wandering lords of Ireland” [$7.95].
The Pre-Raphaelites, edited by Jerome H. Buckley, is a standard anthology, first published in 1968, of that extraordinary brotherhood founded in England in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, together with four other friends, and which had a lasting effect on art and letters in middle and late Victorian England. A new edition of The Pre-Raphaelites was recently published by Academy Chicago [$10.95 paper]. In The Discovery of King Arthur, historian Geoffrey Ashe offered convincing proof not only that Arthur existed, but that he was more like the Arthur of legend than historians ever suspected. A new edition of this historical detective story is available as an Owl Book [$8.95]. Milton Lomask’s The Biographer’s Craft was called a “boon for budding Boswells” by Kirkus Reviews when published last year by Harper & Row, whose Perennial Library is now offering a paper edition [$5.95]. Jesse M. Gellrich’s The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction is the first book-length treatment of the history of textuality from Augustine to Chaucer, and was acclaimed by A.J. Minnis in the Times Literary Supplement as “one of the most successful attempts yet to apply contemporary literary theory to medieval poetry.” Cornell, the original publisher, now has a paper edition of Gellrich’s work [$9.95]. The latest addition to The New Penguin Shakespeare is The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, edited by John Kerrigan [$5.95]. Also available as a Penguin Classic is Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, with an introduction and prose translations by Oliver Bernard [$6.95]. Johns Hopkins is offering a revised edition of Hugh Kenner’s Ulysses, an introduction to James Joyce’s classic work, now keyed to the new, definitive edition of the novel [$20.00 cloth, $7.95 paper]. Oxford has a new edition of William Boelhower’s Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature, an examination of a wide variety of texts concerned with American ethnicity [$17.95 cloth, $7.95 paper]. Jeffrey Meyers’ Disease and the Novel, 1880—1960 explores the belief that art and disease are connected through an examination of works by such authors as Tolstoy, Hemingway, Gide and Mann and has been reprinted in a paper edition by St. Martin’s [$11.95]. Collier Books has a paper edition of Paul F. Ford’s Companion to Narnia: A Complete Guide to the Themes, Characters, and Events of C.S. Lewis’s Enchanting Imaginary World, as created in The Chronicles of Narnia [$10.95].
