Helen Plum Library

Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Bede, the Venerable.

"A Little Devil in America is an urgent project that unravels all modes and methods of black performance, in this moment when black performers are coming to terms with their value, reception, and immense impact on America. With sharp insight, humor, and heart, Abdurraqib examines how black performance happens in specific moments in time and space--midcentury Paris, the moon, or a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. At the outset of this project,...

"The lives of Joseph Addison, Joseph Addison Turner, and Joel Chandler Harris intersected in Civil War-era Georgia thanks to a slave owner who was more interested in literature than in running his plantation. Addison was a British literary giant who was admired by a planter in the American South; the planter named his son after the British writer-publisher and collected his books. Growing up, the young J.A. Turner read Addison and was inspired by...

"A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro : The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father...

Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Jewish-American fiction, 1917-1987.

In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them, in works that readers of all kinds could admire. This book is their story, a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary...

Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Robert Southwell.

"In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith's relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence. Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry--that the black...

"From Leonie Frieda, critically acclaimed biographer of Catherine de Medici, comes The Deadly Sisterhood : an epic tale of eight women whose lives -- marked by fortune and poverty, power and powerlessness -- encompass the spectacle, opportunity, and depravity of Italy's Renaissance. Lucrezia Turnabuoni, Clarice Orsini, Beatrice d'Este, Isabella d'Este, Caterina Sforza, Giulia Farnese, Isabella d'Aragona, and Lucrezia Borgia shared the riches of their...