Reprint, Winter 1993

Of Ronald Hayman’s Proust; A Biography, The New York Times commented, “All the most recent scholarship deftly gathered and woven into a lively narrative.” A new edition of Hayman’s biography of the French novelist is being offered by Carroll & Graf [$15. 95 paper]. Robert Dallek’s Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908—1960, was both a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 1991. Oxford, the original publisher, recently issued a paper edition of Dallek’s definitive portrait of a giant of American politics [$16. 95]. Yale has republished Boswell’s London Journal 1762—1763 edited by Frederick A. Pottle [$15. 00 paper]. Originally published in 1989 by Johns Hopkins, Paula Backscheider’s Daniel Defoe won the British Council Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies. Hopkins recently came out with a paper edition of this life of the author of Robinson Crusoe [$19. 95]. Collier Books has reprinted Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli with an introduction by Mary Gordon [$14. 00]. Houghton Mifflin has a paper edition of James J. Fahey’s Pacific War Diary, 1942—1945: The Secret Diary of an American Sailor [$12. 95]. Additions to the Vintage Civil War Library are, respectively, James I. Robertson, Jr. ‘s General A. P. Hill: The Story of a Confederate Warrior [$14. 00] and All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, edited by Robert Hunt Rhodes with a foreword by Geoffrey C. Ward [$11. 00]. Vintage is also offering a new edition of Eric Lax’ Woody Allen: A Biography [$13. 00]. Washington Square Press has brought out a paper edition of Blood Memory, the autobiography of Martha Graham with more than 100 photographs [$12. 00]. As part of its Library of the American West Series, Orion Books has republished Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell’s Women of the West [$22. 00 paper]. Women of the West are also the subject of Lillian Schlissel’s Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, and a new edition expanded and with a new introduction by the author has been published by Schocken Books [$14. 00 paper]. Washington has reissued William R. Espy’s Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa’s Village, the story of four families who migrated to the tiny settlement of Oysterville in what was then the Territory of Washington [$16. 95 paper]. A recent collection of essays by Samuel F. Picketing, Jr., Let It Ride, is available in a paper edition from Missouri [$10. 95]. Bison Books has a new edition of John Bakeless’ Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark [$12. 95 paper].

Since its first edition more than half a century ago, A Handbook to Literature has served as a guide for those seeking information about all aspects of the literary’ world. Now Macmillan has published a sixth edition of this handbook edited by the late C. Hugh Holman of the University of North Carolina and his colleague in the English Department there, William Harmon. Mr. Harmon has expanded the new edition with 100 new entries reflecting contemporary trends in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and film. The Handbook guides a reader through such questions as “Who were “the Angry Young Men?” “What does it mean when an author writes a Bildungsroman?” or “Who is responsible for Marginalia?”” [$30. 00 cloth]. Georgia has published a paper edition of Southern Literature 6- Literary Theory edited by Jefferson Humphries and containing essays by such critics as Harold Bloom, Fred Chappell, and Henry Louis Gates [$20. 00]. Indiana has a new edition of Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.’s Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877—1915, a book which Choice magazine called “the first full-scale examination of African-American writing produced between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of World War I” [S9. 95 paper]. Norton has a paper edition of Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, the late Mr. Hugo having been director for many years of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, Missoula campus [$8. 95].

Though she is probably better known as the author of six novels, Erica Jong is also a poet who has produced six books of poetry, the last being Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected. A paper edition of Becoming Light is now available as a Harper Perennial book [$14. 00]. Harper Perennial is also offering a centenary edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck with a foreword by Richard Eberhart [$9. 00]. Also available from Harper Collins is a new paper edition of Beowulf translated by Frederick Rebsamen [$4. 50], Bison Books has published a revised edition of The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice [$9. 95 paper]. BOA Editions has a new edition of Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays by Delmore Schwartz, edited and with an introduction by Robert Phillips, Schwartz (1919—1966) having been the youngest American poet to receive the Bollingen Prize [$25. 00 cloth, $12. 50 paper]. Graywolf has reprinted Tess Gallagher’s Moon Crossing Bridge, the chronicle of Ms. Gallagher’s coming to grips with her husband Raymond Carver’s death [$12. 00 paper].

Billed as the most “complete. . . documentary” of World War II, edited by Brigadier Peter Young, The World Almanac of World War II has been praised by the Veterans of Foreign Wars as “the most comprehensive single-volume reference work” on that conflict “ever published.” World Almanac has come out with a paper edition of this reference work on the greatest war in history [$18. 95]. Touchstone Books has published a revised and updated paper edition of New York Times reporter Flora Lewis’ Europe: Road to Unity in which country by country Lewis guides the reader through the continent that spawned Western civilization [$14. 00 paper]. Houghton Mifflin has come out with a paper edition of James B. Simpson’s Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations: The Most Notable Quotes Since 1950 with an introduction by historian Daniel J. Boorstin [$9. 95]. A new edition of Frederic Chapin Lane’s Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance is available from Johns Hopkins [$15. 95 paper]. Recent Yale paperbacks, also available in cloth, include Michael Howard’s The Lessons of History, a collection of essays by one of the most eminent military historians in the world [$11. 00 paper, $30. 00 cloth]; Robert Donington’s Opera and Its Symbols: The Unity of Words, Music, and Staging in which a prominent musicologist discusses the workings of symbolism in opera and the importance of staging an opera in keeping with the composer’s intentions [$12. 00 paper, $32. 00 cloth]; John Firor’s The Changing Atmosphere: A Global Challenge in which a well-known atmospheric scientist describes the causes of acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming [$8. 00 paper, $22. 00 cloth]; and Paul (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) Kennedy’s Grand Strategies in War and Peace, a collection of essays by eminent historians on how various powers have integrated their political, economic, and military goals in order to preserve their long-term interests in times of war and peace [$12. 00 paper, $27. 00 cloth].

For a first novel, Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul attracted an extraordinary amount of attention largely because it took Brodkey some two decades to produce this huge (835 pages) work of fiction. The New York Review of Books called Runaway Soul “a first, but monumental novel. . . .an important work in scale and emotional pitch and intellectual reach.” Harper Perennial recently published a paper edition of Brodkey’s book [$15. 00]. Two recent editions to Random House’s revived Modern Library series are William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury [$14. 50 cloth], and George Eliot’s Middlemarch [$19. 00 cloth]. Richard Llewelyn’s classic account of the lives of Welsh miners recounted in his 1940 novel How Green Was My Valley won the National Book Award and was also put on the screen staring Walter Pigeon and Maureen O’Hara. Now almost 53 years after its original appearance, Collier Books has published a paper edition of Llewellyn’s novel [$10. 00].