When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry in their pockets and their rucksacks, in every theater of war. Comprising 1,200 different titles of every imaginable type, these paperbacks were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy; in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific; in field hospitals; and on long bombing flights. They wrote to the authors, many of whom responded to every letter. They helped rescue "The Great Gatsby" from obscurity. They made Betty Smith, author of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," into a national icon. "When Books Went to War "is an inspiring story for history buffs and book lovers alike.

Product Description: Based on extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials, Unbuttoning America explains how a real-life patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a bestselling novel, a film, and a television series...read more

Product Description: When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations...read more

Product Description: In the 1920s and 1930s the Modern Library series brought out cheap editions of modernist works. Books by writers including H G Wells, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, were published and marketed alongside detective fiction and other books that we would now class as ‘middlebrow’...read more

Product Description: A highly regarded scholar in the fields of American cultural history and print culture, Joan Shelley Rubin is best known for her writings on the values, assumptions, and anxieties that have shaped American life, as reflected in both high culture and the experiences of ordinary people...read more

Product Description: DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF WHAT MAKES A MEGA-BESTSELLER IN THIS ENTERTAINING, REVELATORY GUIDE  What do Michael Corleone, Jack Ryan, and Scout Finch have in common? Creative writing professor and thriller writer James W. Hall knows. Now, in this entertaining, revelatory book, he reveals how bestsellers work, using twelve twentieth-century blockbusters as case studies—including The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jaws...read more

A person who reads a book for self-improvement rather than aesthetic pleasure is OC reading up.OCOa"Reading Up"ais Amy Blair's engaging study of popular literary critics who promoted reading generally and specific books as vehicles for acquiring cultural competence and economic mobility. Combining methodologies from the history of the book and the history of reading, to mass-cultural studies, reader-response criticism, reception studies, and formalist literary analysis, Blair shows how such critics influenced the choices of striving readers and popularized some elite writers.Framed by an analysis of Hamilton Wright Mabie's role promoting the concept of OC reading upOCO during his ten-year stint as the cultivator of literary taste for the highly populara"Ladies' Home Journal," a"Reading Up"areveals how readers flocked to literary works that they would be expected to dislike. Blair shows that while readers could be led to certain books by a trusted adviser, they frequently followed their own path in interpreting them in unexpected ways.

At thirty-nine, SiddaLee Walker has escaped her Louisiana hometown to become a theatrical director, but as she gathers old letters, photos, journals, and souvenirs from the Ya-Ya Sisterhood to assist in writing a play about women's friendships, she yearns to revisit her childhood

Reading lists of some of the author's favorite books accompany her thoughts on the role of books and reading in her life

Product Description: This examination and celebration of the literature and thought of the 1950s throws the enduring works of a golden era into high relief. An unconventional tour of a crucial period in 20th-century culture, the present book avoids sweeping surveys and gets to the heart of major achievement...read more

Product Description: A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer...read more

Product Description: The Trash Phenomenon looks at how writers of the late twentieth century not only have integrated the events, artifacts, and theories of popular culture into their works but also have used those works as windows into popular culture's role in the process of nation building...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Using the annual hardcover best seller lists from 'The Bookman' and then 'Publishers Weekly,' examines twentieth-century American social, cultural, and historical trends through the lens of popular literature. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Elements of popular culture, such as literature and films, are major industries. If scholars are to fully understand how popular culture evolves and functions, techniques for dealing with the impact of business need to be factored into the analysis...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading...read more

Product Description: Fishing by Obstinate Isles explores the relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging American views of a British poetry dominated by antimodernism while discussing the role of rhetorics of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views...read more

'Significant book for history of Latin American literature in English-language translation. Focusing on Waldo Frank's contributions, Rostagno chronicles changing North American attitudes toward Latin American literature. Other chapters deal with Blanche and Alfred Knopf, the serial El Corno Emplumado, the impact(s) of the Cuban Revolution, and the Center for Inter-American Relations. The take of any 'promotion,' however, is far more complicated than Rostagno indicates'--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/ (view table of contents)

Product Description: Book by Link, Mardi

Product Description: In this narrative account of the life and work of Charles Olson, Ralph Maud focuses on what the poet read as a basis for understanding the work he produced.To an extraordinary degree, Olson’s reading and life were coextensive, according to Maud, who notes that Olson saw his written output over his lifetime as a total cosmology...read more