Now, nearly forty years after its original translation into English, Roger Asselineau's complete and magisterial biography of Walt Whitman will remind readers of the complex weave of traditions in W
Attributed to the Harrow Painter reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the speaker’
Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In
In early twentieth-century U.S. culture, sex sold. While known mainly for its social reforms, the Progressive Era was also obsessed with prostitution, sexuality, and the staging of women’s changing ro
"In on behalf of the family farm, Jenny Baker Devine demonstrates that in an era where technology, depopulation and rapid economic change dramatically altered rural life, Midwestern women met those ch
In this volume, Kevin J. Hayes collects thirty accounts of Thomas Jefferson written by his granddaughters, visiting dignitaries, fellow politicians, and others who knew him as a family man, public ser
The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interest
?For Walt Whitman, living and working in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War, Reconstruction meant not only navigating these tumultuous years alongside his fellow citizens but also coming to terms w
Readers everywhere fell for Elizabeth Corey, the irrepressible, independent, and fearless Bachelor Bess, whose letters home to Iowa gave us a firsthand account of her adventures on a South Dakota home
From the fictional portrayal of Dr. Gregory House to Jerome Groopman's bestseller How Doctors Think, both medical professionals and the general public recognize that there is more to the doctor's job
The stories in Things Kept, Things Left Behind explore the ambiguities of kept secrets, the tangles of abandoned pasts, and uneasy accommodations. Jim Tomlinson’s characters each face the desire to re
Who cooks dinner in American homes? It's no surprise that “Mom” remains the overwhelming answer. Cooking and all it entails, from grocery shopping to chopping vegetables to clearing the
Originally published in 1978, The Worlds between Two Rivers intentionally reflected a wide spectrum of views on Native Americans in Iowa: those of Native Americans themselves and of Euro-Americans, th
In these nine stories, Marian Crotty inhabits the lives of people searching for human connection. Her characters, most often young women, are honest, troubled, and filled with longing. In the title st
While most coloring books offer fanciful recreations of the wonders of nature, Mark Muller’s realistic drawings allow you to embellish real-world birds, plants, and animals with all the colors you can
Places in the Making maps a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century American poets who have used language to evoke the world at various scales. Distinct from related traditions including landscap
Writing was the central passion of Emerson’s life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in “The Poet,” “The American Scholar,”Nature, “Goethe,” and “Persian Poetry,” less well known are
Atop a scenic bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and downtown Dubuque there once lay a graveyard dating to the 1830s, the earliest days of American settlement in Iowa. Though many local residents
Every year from April to October, the Sanchez family traveled?crowded in the back of trucks, camping in converted barns, tending and harvesting crops across the breadth of the United States. Although
Price has assembled a collection of literature in a variety of forms, either about or set in the tallgrass bioregion. Organized by century, with writing from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-firs
Jean Ross Justice’s Family Feeling, a novella and collection of stories, is a moving portrait of American domestic life of the last half-century. Often spanning generations, the stories are defined by
During the 1850s and early 1860s, Iowa, the westernmost free state bordering a slave state, stood as a bulwark of antislavery sentiment while the decades-long struggle over slavery shifted westward. O
This collection of essays pays tribute to Philip Levine as teacher and mentor. Throughout his fifty-year teaching career, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Levine taught scores of younger poets, many of whom
Contributing to and drawing on the emerging field of sound studies, Morrissette (English, U. of North Carolina at Greensboro) analyzes the complex aesthetic of sound embodied in the works of James Wel
Imagine a place dedicated to the long-term study of nature in nature, a permanent biological field station, a teaching and research laboratory that promotes complete immersion in the natural world. La
New laws enacted in the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power removed all Jews from their professional workplaces and banned Jewish artists from any collaboration with their fellow citizens. In the summer
In Racial Things, Racial Forms, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau—wh
In The American H.D., Annette Debo considers the significance of nation in the artistic vision and life of the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle. Her versatile career stretching from 1906 to 1961, H.D.
In the 1880s, the well-connected young Englishman William B. Close and his three brothers, having bought thousands of acres of northwest Iowa prairie, conceived the idea of enticing sons of Britain’s
When his father developed Alzheimer’s disease, Don Lago realized that the stories and traditions of his Swedish ancestors would be lost along with the rest of his father’s memories. Haunted by this
In The Penultimate Suitor Mary Leader strips away comfortable layers of poetic self-protection to arrive at a position of acute emotional self-conflagration. Each poem turns upon and returns to the
Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this edited volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a g
Screenwriting for Neurotics is a quirky and accessible handbook for beginning screenwriters. Whether you are a student in a screenwriting class or just someone who wants to try their hand at writing f
For several years just before and just after his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, Walt Whitman regularly frequented Pfaff’s beer cellar in downtown Manhattan. The basement bar was the very ce
American children need books that draw on their own history and circumstances, not just the classic European fairy tales. They need books that enlist them in the great democratic experiment that is th
Thirty-five years and many acres after planting his first patch of prairie flowers, Carl Kurtz is considered one of the deans of the great tallgrass prairie revival. The Prairie Enthusiast called the
The damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the e
Carroll Engelhardt’s parents grew up in homes without electricity on farms without tractors and began farming in the same way. As a farm boy in northeastern Iowa, he thought that history happened only
These finely wrought stories unfold in the Dakotas during the struggling pioneer days and bone-dry landscape of the thirties as well as the verdant years that followed, where the nighttime plains are
?A series of vividly rendered personal narratives, Trespasses: A Memoir recounts the coming of age of three generations in the rural Great Plains. In examining how class, race, and gender play out in
