In his first novel, British scholar Christopher W.E. Bigsby provides a prequel to The Scarlet Letter, introducing readers to a younger Hester Prynne. He tells of her attempts to flee an oppressive marriage to Roger Chillingworth, her love affair with Arthur Dimmesdale, and her life in the New World. In the process, Bigsby condemns the obstacles and prejudices that strong, intelligent women faced in the 17th century, providing a powerful narrative reframing of a compelling literary character.
In his first novel, British scholar Christopher W.E. Bigsby provides a prequel to The Scarlet Letter, introducing readers to a younger Hester P...
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream Since it was first performed in 1949, Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the tragic shortcomings of an American dreamer has been recognized as a milestone of the theater. Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, has spent his life following the American way, living out his belief in salesmanship as a way to reinvent himself. But somehow the riches and respect he covets have eluded him. At age 63, he searches for the moment his life took a wrong turn, the moment of betrayal...
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream Since it was first performed in 1949, Arthur Miller's Pulitzer ...
Joe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop during World War II, turned out defective airplane parts, causing the deaths of many men. Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went back to business, making himself very wealthy in the ensuing years. In Miller's work of tremendous power, a love affair between Keller's son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Steve's daughter, the bitterness of George Keller, who returns from the war to find his father in prison and his father's partner free, and the reaction of a son to his father's guilt escalate toward a climax of...
Joe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop during World War II, turned out defective airplane parts, causing the deaths of many men. Deev...
A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community "I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history," Arthur Miller wrote in an introduction to The Crucible, his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the...
A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community "I believe that the reader will discover here the essential na...
The forgotten classic that launched the career of one of America's greatest playwrights
It took more than fifty years for The Man Who Had All the Luck to be appreciated for what it truly is: the first stirrings of a genius that would go on to blossom in such masterpieces as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. Infused with the moral malaise of the Depression era, the parable-like drama centers on David Beeves, a man whose every obstacle to personal and professional success seems to crumble before him with ease. But his good fortune merely serves to reveal the...
The forgotten classic that launched the career of one of America's greatest playwrights
It took more than fifty years for The Man Who Had ...
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well Eschewing a conventional residence and lifestyle, Thoreau set up home in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, a mile from his nearest neighbor, and earned his living by labor of his own hands. Most people, he says are so occupied with the factitious care and toils of life that its finer fruits remain unplucked. So he went to Walden in an attempt to find, in the seemingly simple routines of life stripped to its essentials, the shape beneath what is apparently chaotic....
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well Eschewing a conventional residence and lifesty...
This is the first of two volumes in which Christopher Bigsby offers extended critical readings of the work of the leading dramatists and theatre groups in twentieth-century America. In this century drama has emerged as one of the most exciting expressions of American creativity, and during the 1930s became a primary means of addressing the cultural, political and economic changes of the period. But it has received surprisingly little attention. This is a chronological and selective study related to American culture as a whole and providing a picture of a vigorous theatre in the process of...
This is the first of two volumes in which Christopher Bigsby offers extended critical readings of the work of the leading dramatists and theatre group...
In this the third and final volume of his critical account of American drama in the twentieth century Christopher Bigsby turns from the text-oriented drama of Williams, Miller and Albee (volume two) in order to trace other, parallel theatrical developments of the post-war period, including contemporary groups and playwrights.
'Beyond Broadway' denotes the geographical and spiritual challenges to prevailing standards which so fragmented the theatre of the 1960s in particular. Following his analysis of the Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway playwrights and theatres, Dr Bigsby separates the...
In this the third and final volume of his critical account of American drama in the twentieth century Christopher Bigsby turns from the text-oriented ...
A cofounder of the Provincetown Players and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the first female playwrights. Although long neglected, the four plays collected in this critical edition reveal the thoroughly modern nature of her concerns. Trifles (1916) develops a feminist critique of social role, while The Outside (1917) stages a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell presented an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. And...
A cofounder of the Provincetown Players and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the first female playwrights. ...
