Lives Out of Letters: Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation, in Honor of Robert N. HudspethEdited by Robert D. Habich
About the Editor:
Robert D. Habich (Ph.D., Penn State) is Professor of English at Ball State University and Secretary/Treasurer of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. He is the author of Transcendentalism and the "Western Messenger" (FDU P, 1985) and of numerous articles and reviews in American literature, including studies of Emerson and his biographers, Margaret Fuller, Benjamin Franklin, and the Southwestern humorists.
Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, attention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation. Part I is devoted to spectific biographical and interpretive studies. Mark L. Sargent reconsiders William Bradford's excised letters in Of Plymouth Plantation and casts the book as an "epistolary tale." Rochelle Johnson recreates the career of Susan Fenimore Cooper as she struggles to define a separate vocation as a writer. Sandra Spanier uses Kay Boyle's private correspondence with Malcolm Cowley and others to problematize conventional views of the "Lost Generation." James D. Boyer reinterprets Thomas Wolfe's later stories as a consequence of his experience in Germany in the 1930s. Other essays in Part I argue for expanded definitions of both "documentation" and "biography." Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola explores the relation between biography and celebrity in early American captivity narratives. Larry A. Carlson recreates a communal life of the transcendental Fruitlands experiment in 1842-43. For Henry Golemba, Frank Webb's antebellum novel about race and injustice, The Garies and Their Friends (1857) is contextualized both by its genetic indebtedness to slave narratives and by Webb's particularly complicated quest as an African American to carve out a place as a professional author. In Part II, other accomplished literary biographers reflect on the rewards of their craft. Phyllis Cole, author of Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism, parallels Emerson's Aunt Mary's life with her own professional journey. Gary Scharnhorst, who has written the lives of Horatio Alger, Jr., Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Bret Harte, defends the biographer as literary archaeologist. Charles Hackenberry, whose novel Friends won the Western Writers of America'a Spur Award in 1993, weaves the story of his discovery of Charles Chesnutt's unpublished novel Mandy Oxendine into the narrative of Chesnutt's own struggle to find a voice and publish. Robert D. Richardson, the prize-winning biographer of both Emerson and Thoreau, reflects on the perils of biography--and the rewards it still offers.ISBN 0-8386-4005-2, Price $52.50
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