Search Results: American Literature from Monongahela Books

This, the first full-length study of the recently rediscovered poet of the First World War, John Allan Wyeth, contains several in-depth studies of the poetry as well as a wealth of new biographical material. Essays include:~~ John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation.~~ Artistry & Authenticity in the War Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth.~~ A Yank at the Battle of Amiens: The Chipilly Ridge Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth.~~ Wyeth on Horseback~~ John Allan Wyeth and the British War Poets: A Preliminary Comparison.~~ Poet, Painter Spy: Did John Allan Wyeth report on Nazi Activities for British Intelligence during the 1930s?~~ Notes on the Friendship of John Allan Wyeth and Edmund Wilson.~~ Notes on Wyeth's Years in Rapallo.~~ The Rediscovery of a Forgotten War Poet: A Personal Account.

VG/NF. Hardcover in dust jacket in near fine condition except for remainder mark on bottom edge of book. ~~~ Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 270 pages. ~~~ "This deftly written, almost unbearably moving book serves to remind us powerfully of the horrors faced by the wounded on the Civil War battlefields, of the genius and compassion of Walt Whitman in dealing with them, and of the remarkable skill of one of America's most accomplished biographers in researching and telling so poignant a story." --Simon Winchester

NEW copy. Historical facsimile edition of the original 1919 edition by The Lafayette Publishing Company, Paris. Maps, illustrations, 24 pages. ~~~ " . . . touring the battle sites atChateau Thierry, Vaux, Belleau Woods, Bouresches, La Voie du Chatel, La Loge Farm, Coupru, Bezu-le-Guery, along the Marne, Soissons, Berzy-le-Sec, Vierzy, Chavigny Ferme, Longpont, Juvigny, along the River Ourcq, Chateau de Fere & Fismes." ~~~ "This little book is designed as a friendly guide to accompany the American pilgrim on his journey among those landmarks in American history which the young troops from across the Atlantic left on the historic acres that lie between the Marne and the Vesle. ~~~ There is good reason to believe that Chateau-Thierry will always be the great American shrine in France --- not the old Marne city alone or chiefly, but rather the battlefield of which it became the tip when American machine0gunners met the Germans in its streets on the last day of May, 1918. ~~~ There are greater sights to… Read More

Very Good +. Hardcover, clean, tight, no chips or edgewear, slight toning to spine. A very nice copy in collectible condition. No dust jacket. ~~~ First Edition, Third Printing (Feb 1933). ~~~ Praised by Grahme Greene, Christopher Morley and Ernest Hemingway as one of the most significant novels of the First World War. ~~~ Innovative in form, it is told through the eyes of 113 different participants, all US Marines. Notable for its irony and bitter realism. ~~~ William March was an enlisted Marine serving with the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, 4th Brigade of Marines, 2d Division, A.E.F. Despite being seriously wounded in the shoulder and head at Belleau Wood, he recovered and returned to active duty, serving out the rest of the war. He was twice promoted. At Blanc Mont he was wounded a second time while carrying in wounded under fire. For this he was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm and Distinguished Service Cross.

NEW copy, paperback. Illustrations, 35 pages. ~~~ Every poem in the "Dark Hills of Home" had its birth among the foothills and hollows of the western Alleghenies, between the Ohio and Monongahela rivers in the heart of Appalachia--- where the sun rises late and sets early, and the night is never entirely absent. ~~~~~ Illustrated with period engravings and printed on heavy glossy paper. Approx. 4.5" x 7". Paperback, perfect-bound. 48 pages. ~~~~~ Marc Harshman's "Woman in Red Anorak" won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize and was published in 2018 by Lynx House Press. His fourteenth children's book, "Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright's Masterpiece," co-authored with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. He is also co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, SPM Publications [London], University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. He has been Poet Laureate of West Virginia since 2012.

NEW copy, F/F. Hardcover with dust jacket. Bibliography, index, 145 pages. ~~~ "Kempf has made good use of primar source materials, most notable of which are the extensive collection of Cowley papers now deposited at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the files of the little magazines of the 1920s. By presenting the long foreground of Cowley's distinguished life and by emphasizing the remarkable consisteny of Cowley's feelings about art, Kempf has made an important evaluation of a significant literary career."

Trade paperback, NF condition. ~~~ Introduction, essays, annotations, bibliography, index, 390 pages. ~~~ With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror in the face of raw nature. ~~ Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world,… Read More

NEW copy. Hardcover with laminated, illustrated covers (issued without dust jacket. Illustrated, notes, index, 129 pages. OUT OF PRINT. ---
Allusions to the sea permeate Thoreau's writings, enriching many of his basic ideas. Harp on the Shore examines Thoreau's use of maritime metaphor. It shows how he, a writer ordinarily perceived as quintessentially landlocked, came to view the terrestrial world in terms of the oceanic.
The book explores both the poetic and the philosophical implications of Thoreau's passion for the sea. Beginning with Thoreau's deep attachment to the sea and maritime life in New England and the ways in which that attachment stimulated his imaginative identification of Concord as a center of maritime activity, it examines the sea voyage as a symbol of man's intellectual processes. The book shows how maritime allusions enlarge the significance of Thoreau's ideas about man's struggle to attain individuality and identity, his notion of Homeric or Edenic man, and his belief in a middle… Read More

VG. Remainder mark on bottom edge of book, otherwise a clean, tight copy. ~~~ Illustrations, Chronology, Principal sources, Notes, Index, 455 pages. ~~~ The two years Thoreau spent at Walden Pond and the night he spent in the Concord jail are among the most familiar features of the American intellectual landscape. In this new biography, based on a reexamination of Thoreau's manuscripts and on a retracing of his trips, Robert Richardson offers a view of Thoreau's life and achievement in their full nineteenth century context.

NEW copy, trade paperback. Illustrations, essays by various hands, reviews, biographical note, bibliography, 109 pages. ~~~ In 2011 a tiny press in Berkeley published Visions & Affiliations, an eccentric 1300-page chronology of post-war California literature in two massive paperbound folio volumes. With no commercial distribution or publicity, the book sold about two hundred copies and soon vanished from sight--but not from the memory of the small audience that read it. Some of them considered the elaborate time line the first adequate account of California's complex and contradictory literary life. Others recognized Foley's radical innovation in changing how literary history could be written. A few even considered the strange, sprawling, yet compulsively readable tomes an oddball masterpiece. ~~ Contributions by Scott Timberg, Dana Gioia, Peter Whitfield, Lucille Lang Day, Colin Cooper, Jack Foley, David Mason and Marian J. Hollinger.

NEW copy, trade paperback. Introductory essay by BJ Omanson, photographs by Jared Carter, 57 pages. ~~~ "Jared Carter's poetry -- in its fidelity both to the letter and the spirit of the land -- does something that art should never lose sight of: it adheres so scrupulously to the world as it is, to the 'local habitation' in all its distinctiveness, particularity and long extent of its history, that it assumes the very form and character of that region, is shaped and scoured by it, and so becomes a true expression of the land itself."

NF/NF. Hardcover with dust jacket in 'as new' condition. ~~~ Detailed notes following each letter, index, 374 pages. ~~~ The first letters in Volume I are those of a seven-year-old child; the last were written by an uncommonly well-educated woman ready for a larger challenge than schoolteaching could offer her. The letters tell the story of her work with Amos Bronson Alcott and his experimental Temple School, of the early days of her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the beginnings of her life as a writer, and of her important work as translator and critic of Goethe.

New paperback. Illustrated, bibliography, picture credits, 117 pages. ~~~ "The renaissance in Longfellow studies can be said to have begun in 1993 with the publication in The Columbia History of American Poetry of "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism," a lengthy essay by the California poet and educator Dana Gioia, who would later serve as director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia's spirited testimonial amounted to a clarion call for reconsideration . . ." -Nicholas A. Basbanes, in the introduction to Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Trade paperback in Near Fine condition. ~~~ Illustrated, introduction by Douglas H. Strong, notes, bibliography, index, 250 pages. ~~~ Hans Huth was for many years Curator of Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and a consultant for the U.S. National Park Service. --- For this new Bison Book edition, Douglas H. Strong has written an introduction discussing recent developments in the environmental movement and the contribution of Nature and the American to the burgeoning crusade for nature.

Consisting of over fifty poems, from short lyrics in a variety of forms to lengthy blank verse and free verse narratives, "Stark County Poems" portrays the history of a small rural county in central Illinois, along the upper Spoon River valley. ~~ Chronologically arranged, and incorporating letters, newspaper articles, obituaries, family stories, early county histories and diaries, the poems cover a century of the county's history, from the 1830s through the 1930s. ~~ BJ Omanson was raised in the Spoon River valley of Stark County, Illinois, where both sides of his family have lived and farmed since the mid-19th century. ~~ He has published poetry, literary criticism, regional and military history.

VG/VG. Hardcover with unclipped dust jacket. A tight, clean copy. Book without chips or tears to cover. Jacket has minor chipping to head of spine (see photo), now in mylar protector. Originally published by George H. Doran Company in 1921. This Modern Library edition published in 1932 with a new introduction by the author. ~~~From the dust jacket: "Three Soldiers . . . reveals the cant and manufactured romanticism of war. Thrjough the experiences of three men of the ranks, humanity's most ghastly venture in mutual destruction stands condemned as criminal and futile. Three Soldiers introduced a writer who has sine beome a major figure among American novelists. Upon this first book his reputation rests securely."

In his memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road, BJ Omanson recounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of poetry-- a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness solitude and-- as he was a high-school dropout-- nothing whatever to do with writing programs or academia. ---- In November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his job as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, Omanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle's WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his intention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State, where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw. ---- He would spend the winter camping in a primitive shelter in an alder glade above the Calawah river,… Read More

VG/VG. Original "$8.95" price still intact on dust jacket. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). One of the Lost American Fiction series edited by Matthew J. Bruccolli. Reprinted from the original Scribners 1923 edition. Unique to this edition: an Afterward by James Dickey. 278 pages. ~~~~~ Through the Wheat was recommended to Scribners by F. Scott Fitzgerald and received highly favorable notice on its appearance from Edmund Wilson, among others. Boyd served with B Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines at Belleau Wood, Soissons, St Mihiel and Blanc Mont, where he was seriously gassed. After the war he worked as a journalist and writer, publishing nine books of fiction and history. He died at 37 of a cerebral hemorrhage. ~~~~~ EXCERPT: "For a distance of two miles, from the ravine to the village where the supply wagons were stationed, men lay dead and dying. In the woods and particularly in the gulley that ran through the woods to the village, the thick yellow gas clung to the… Read More

NEW copy, paperback. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. Illustrations, Night after night through heavy shellfire, Alpheus Appenheimer, a private with the 6th Machine Gun Battalion, 4th Brigade of Marines, hauled ammunition to front-line positions of his company with a 4-line mule-team and wagon during the fiercest fighting at Belleau Wood. ~~~ For years after the war, Alpheus hoped to return to Belleau Wood with his wife, America, to show her where he had served during those desperate days and nights in June, 1918, when a single brigade of Marines stood against the German drive on Paris. But the realities of raising a family on a small Illinois farm during the agricultural depression of the 1920s made a trip to France all but impossible, and it was not until seventy-five years after the war that the first member of Alpheus's family was able to make the pilgrimage to Belleau Wood for him.

NF/NF. Hardcover with dust jacket in 'as new' condition ~~~ Illustrated end pages (map), introduction, related passages, a Thoreau chronology, glossary of botanical terms, a note on the provenance of the manuscript, manuscript facsimile, 90-odd pages of notes, works cited, index, 409 pages. ~~~ Thoreau's Walden (1854) is regarded both as a masterpiece of American prose and as a forerunner of modern environmentalism. Its author spent much of the 1850s learning what botany could teach him about the New England woods he chronicled. Thoreau brought that knowledge to bear on this sometimes very beautiful essay about plants, fruits and nuts, left incomplete at his death in 1862 and here printed for the first time. Thoreau's brief preface echoes the passions of Walden: "What are all the oranges imported into England to the hips and haws in her hedges?" The rest of the work is arranged fruit by fruit: we begin with elm-fruit ("most mistake the fruit before it falls for leaves, and we owe to it the first… Read More