This book is a compilation of selected stories, essays, and reminiscences that Dorothy West wrote for the Vineyard Gazette from the 1960s to the early 1990s. In these entries, West retraces life on the island as she experienced it from 1908, when she was an infant, to 1993 when she wrote her final column. Born in 1907 in Boston, Dorothy West went on to develop into a prize-winning author by the time she was in her teens. The 1926 award she received in New York, and the lure of the city itself, inspired West to leave Boston and join what was then a fledgling literary movement that would evolve...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the center of black social and business life in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the area known as Vinegar Hill. But in 1960, noting the prevalence of aging frame houses and substandard conditions such as outdoor toilets, voters decided that Vinegar Hill would be redeveloped. Charlottesville s black residents lost a cultural center, largely because they were deprived of a voice in government. Vinegar Hill s displaced residents discuss the loss of homes and businesses and the impact of the project on black life in Charlottesville. The interviews raise questions...

This book draws connections between Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher and specific works of classic literature. Chapter I explores the horrors of the Civil War as conveyed in Mosher's Walking to Gatlinburg and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Major characters, in those works, escape the battlefield and then, later, feel the need to redeem themselves for what could be considered a cowardly act. Chapter II is an analysis of how Mosher and three classic authors explore industrialization's presentation of certain physical and moral dangers, especially with regard to women's safety....