Download or read book Philadelphia Fire written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of John Wideman’s most ambitious and celebrated works, the lyrical masterpiece and PEN/Faulkner winner inspired by the 1985 police bombing of the West Philadelphia row house owned by black liberation group Move. In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing eleven people and starting a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event: a young boy seen running from the flames. Award-winning author John Edgar Wideman brings these events and their repercussions to shocking life in this seminal novel. “Reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (Time) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Philadelphia Fire is a masterful, culturally significant work that takes on a major historical event and takes us on a brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Furniture written by Edgar Allan Poe and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Philosophy of Furniture" is an essay written by American author Edgar Allan Poe published in 1840. An unusual work by Poe, whose more typical works include horror tales like "The Tell-Tale Heart," the essay is essentially Poe's theories on interior decorating. Poe begins by suggesting that the English are the "supreme" examples of internal decoration, above the Italians, French, Chinese, Scotch, Dutch, Spanish and Russians. "Yankees," he says, "are preposterous." He blames this American failing on a lack of aristocracy by blood, having instead "an aristocracy of dollars." Because of that, decoration in America has become a "mere parade of costly appurtenances" to create an "impression of the beautiful." He contrasts this with England, where wealth is not the loftiest ambition to constitute "nobility." As a result, Poe says, "there could be nothing more directly offensive to the eye of an artist than the interior of what is termed the United States... a well-furnished apartment." Because decorating rooms is a form of art, it should be judged similarly to any other work of art. The elements of a room should work well together, just as in a painting. Poe begins giving his advice, starting with curtains. Excessive drapery, he says, is "irreconcilable with good taste." Curtains should be chosen based on the general character of the room. He puts strong emphasis on carpets, which he calls "the soul of the apartment." From the carpet, the colors and forms of the rest of the room can be determined. He recommends patterns "of no meaning," as "the abomination of flowers or representations of well-known objects of any kind should not be endured." Carpets, curtains, tapestry, or even ottoman coverings and upholstery of any kind should be "rigidly Arabesque." Gaudy patterns "glorious with all hues" are a cloth version of a kaleidoscope and only serve worshipers of Mammon. Gas lighting is "inadmissible," Poe says, because it is harsh and unsteady. "No one having both brains and eyes will use it," he says. He also dismisses large chandeliers as "the quintessence of all that is false in taste or preposterous in folly." Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. Born in Boston, he was the second child of two actors. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died the following year. Thus orphaned, the child was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia. Although they never formally adopted him, Poe was with them well into young adulthood. Tension developed later as John Allan and Edgar repeatedly clashed over debts, including those incurred by gambling, and the cost of secondary education for the young man. Poe attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. Poe quarreled with Allan over the funds for his education and enlisted in the Army in 1827 under an assumed name. It was at this time his publishing career began, albeit humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian." With the death of Frances Allan in 1829, Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement. Later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point and declaring a firm wish to be a poet and writer, Poe parted ways with John Allan.
Download or read book The Literary History of Philadelphia written by Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Literary Philadelphia A History of Poetry and Prose in the City of Brotherly Love written by Thom Nickels and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2015 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin put type to printing press, Philadelphia has been a haven and an inspiration for writers. Local essayist Agnes Repplier once shared a glass of whiskey with Walt Whitman, who frequently strolled Market Street. Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard plumbed the city's dark streets for material. In the twentieth century, Northern Liberties native John McIntyre found a backdrop for his gritty noir in the working-class neighborhoods, while novelist Pearl S. Buck discovered a creative sanctuary in Center City. From Quaker novelist Charles Brockden Brown to 1973 U.S. poet laureate Daniel Hoffman, author Thom Nickels explores Philadelphia's literary landscape.
Download or read book Letters from Filadelfia written by Rodrigo Lazo and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was Filadelfia, a symbol of republican government for the Americas and the most important Spanish-language print center in the early United States. In Letters from Filadelfia, Rodrigo Lazo opens a window into Spanish-language writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travelers, and immigrants who settled and passed through Philadelphia during this vibrant era, when the city’s printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism. The first book-length study of Philadelphia publications by intellectuals such as Vicente Rocafuerte, José María Heredia, Manuel Torres, Juan Germán Roscio, and Servando Teresa de Mier, Letters from Filadelfia offers an approach to discussing their work as part of early Latino literature and the way in which it connects to the United States and other parts of the Americas. Lazo’s book is an important contribution to the complex history of the United States’ first capital. More than the foundation for the U.S. nation-state, Philadelphia reached far beyond its city limits and, as considered here, suggests new ways to conceptualize what it means to be American.
Download or read book Philadelphia Noir written by Carlin Romano and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Residents of Philadelphia have been nagging Akashic Books for years to see their own entry in the award-winning Noir series. The time has finally arrived - but the city must beware as there may be no recovery from the tarnishing of this collection of 15 original crime stories. Features brand-new stories by Diane Ayres, Cordelia Frances Biddle, Keith Gilman, Cary Holladay, Solomon Jones, Gerald Kolpan, Aimee LaBrie, Halimah Marcus, Carlin Romano, Asali Solomon, Laura Spagnoli, Duane Swierczynski, Dennis Tafoya and Jim Zervanos.
Download or read book The Literary History of Philadelphia written by Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer and published by . This book was released on 2014-02-02 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hardcover reprint of the original 1906 edition - beautifully bound in brown cloth covers featuring titles stamped in gold, 8vo - 6x9". No adjustments have been made to the original text, giving readers the full antiquarian experience. For quality purposes, all text and images are printed as black and white. This item is printed on demand. Book Information: Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson. The Literary History of Philadelphia. Indiana: Repressed Publishing LLC, 2012. Original Publishing: Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson. The Literary History of Philadelphia, . Philadelphia, G. W. Jacobs & Co, 1906. Subject: American literature
Download or read book Franklin of Philadelphia written by Esmond Wright and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first comprehensive biography in 50 years has taken advantage of Yale's massive edition-in-progress of Franklin's papers and of the many specialized studies inspired by the correspondence. Designed for the general reader, it is also a work for scholars, and includes an analysis of other interpretations of Franklin's career and personality.
Download or read book Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America written by William Penn and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-03-30 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is A New Release Of The Original 1681 Edition.
Download or read book LITERARY HISTORY OF PHILADELPHIA written by ELLIS PAXSON. OBERHOLTZER and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philadelphia Stories written by Samuel Otter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Philadelphia Stories, Samuel Otter finds literary value, historical significance, and political urgency in a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War. Historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia. Yet while individual writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Lippard have been linked to Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand these figures, and many others, as writing in a tradition tied to the city's history. The site of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in religious toleration and representative government and of national Declaration and Constitution, near the border between slavery and freedom, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential "free" African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the laboratory for a social experiment with international consequences. Philadelphia would be the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible future for the United States after slavery would be played out. It would be the arena in which various residents would or would not demonstrate their capacities to participate in the nation's civic and political life. Otter argues that the Philadelphia "experiment" (the term used in the nineteenth-century) produced a largely unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities, in which verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation.
Download or read book Philadelphia Gentlemen written by E. Digby Baltzell and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This proper Philadelphia story starts with the city’s golden age at the close of the eighteenth century. It is a classic study of an American business aristocracy of colonial stock with Protestant affiliations as well as an analysis of how fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century family founders in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, supported various exclusive institutions that in the course of the twentieth century produced a national upper-class way of life. But as that way of life became an end of itself, instead of an effort to consolidate power and control, the upper-class outlived its function; this, argues Baltzell, is precisely what took place in the Philadelphia class system. Philadelphia Gentlemen emphasizes that class is largely a matter of family, whereas an elite is largely a matter of individual achievement. The emphasis in Philadelphia on old classes, in contrast to the emphasis in New York and Boston on individual achievement and elite striving, helps to explain the dramatically different outcomes of ruling class domination in major centers of the Eastern Establishment. In emphasizing class membership or family prestige, the dynamics of industrial and urban life passed by rather than through Philadelphia. As a result in the race for urban preeminence, Philadelphia lost precious time and eventually lost the struggle for ruling preeminence as such. When the book initially appeared, it was hailed by The New York Times as “a very, very important book.” Writing in the pages of the American Sociological Review, Seymour Martin Lipset noted that “Philadelphia Gentlemen says important things about class and power in America, and says them in ways that will interest and fascinate both sociologists and laymen.” And in the American Historical Review, Baltzell’s book was identified simply as “a gold mine of information.” In short, for sociologists, historians, and those concerned with issues of culture and the economy, this is indeed a classic of modern social science.
Download or read book Row House Days written by Jack Myers and published by Infinity Publishing. This book was released on 2005-03 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictionalized memoir which explores the dynamics of being raised in a declining Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood. Pint-sized and four-eyed, little Jimmy Morris is near the bottom of the food chain in his working class "streetcar suburb" of Kings Cross. He's a dreamer, schemer, schoolyard scrapper, secret lover of books, and classroom clown ... a kid you can't decide whether to hug or to slap. Meanwhile, the conformity of the 1950s is yielding to those turbulent '60s. Yes, the times they definitely were a changin' with Kings Cross in the eye of the societal storm.
Download or read book The Philadelphia Book Or Specimens of Metropolitan Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 1836 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Literary Landmarks of Philadelphia With Plates written by Joseph JACKSON (of Philadelphia.) and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Port Folio written by and published by . This book was released on 1831 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philadelphia Builds written by Michael J. Lewis and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth tout of Philadelphia's architectural history from the 1700s to the present day--for the general reader.
