Download or read book SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF WELDON KEES written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees written by Weldon Kees and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the age of thirty, Weldon Kees (1914?55) was a poet, journalist, musician, painter, photographer, and short story writer living in New York City. Despite a contract for aøforthcoming novel, however, he stopped writing fiction, moved to San Francisco, and worked as an artist and filmmaker. On July 18, 1955, his car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he has not been seen since. These stories by Kees, predominantly set in Depression-era mid-America, feature bleak, realistic settings and characters resigned to their meager lives. The owner of an auto parts store occasionally "sells" his sister Betty Lou to interested patrons; a cryptic message in library books indicates the yearnings of a silenced patron; a young woman taking tickets at the Roseland Gardens futilely dreams of escape from the future she sees for herself; and an old man carefully saves his money to fulfill the requirements of a chain letter only to be disappointed by a spiteful daughter-in-law. Many of these stories are set in the Nebraska of Kees's youth, and they are written from a Midwestern sensibility: keenly observant, darkly humorous, and absurdly fantastic. In this new edition, Dana Gioia has added three stories to the fourteen gathered in the first edition, The Ceremony and Other Stories. The New York Times named that first edition, published in 1984, a notable book of the year.
Download or read book Vanished Act written by James Reidel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists?the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing?and elusive?artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees?s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life. ø Reidel traces Kees?s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.
Download or read book The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees written by Weldon Kees and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees showcases the dark brilliance of one of America's most fascinating artistic and literary figures, Weldon Kees (1914-55). --University of Nebraska Press.
Download or read book Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation written by Weldon Kees and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-06-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before he vanished in the fog of San Francisco, Weldon Kees (1914?55) was a poet, storyteller, critic, painter, musician, and filmmaker. What remains is a body of work and a large collection of letters that shed light on Kees?s complex personality. Robert E. Knoll traces the odyssey of a Nebraska boy who made his way in a fiercely competitive national scene, befriending the movers and shakers of the art worlds on both coasts. Kees?s letters?satirical, witty, poetic, gossipy, intensely individual?provide the feel of lives being lived, of a career going forth, and finally, of the darkness that engulfed him when, in Knoll's phrase, he was "ten minutes from triumph."
Download or read book Fall Quarter written by Weldon Kees and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fall Quarter is an academic black comedy about a young professor who battles the dreariness and banality of a staid Nebraskan college."--Goodreads
Download or read book Vanished Act written by James Reidel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists—the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing—and elusive—artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees’s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life. Reidel traces Kees’s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Aspects of Robinson written by Christoper Howell and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kees was, I believe, one of the four or five most talented members of his generation. And this is the great post-modern generation of American poets which includes Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Theodore Roethke. That these other writers are so widely known and discussed while Kees is so forgotten seems strange indeed. -Dana Gioia, "The Achievement of Weldon Kees"
Download or read book The Poetry of Weldon Kees written by John T. Irwin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study in how a poet’s corpus is remembered after he vanishes. Weldon Kees is one of those fascinating people of whom you’ve likely never heard. Most intriguingly, he disappeared without a trace on July 18, 1955. Police found his 1954 Plymouth Savoy abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge one day later. The keys were still in the ignition. Though Kees had alluded days prior to picking up and moving to Mexico, none of his poetry, art, or criticism has since surfaced either north or south of the Rio Grande. Kees’s vanishing has led critics to compare him to another American modernist poet who met a similar end two decades prior—Hart Crane. In comparison to Crane, Kees is certainly now a more obscure figure. John T. Irwin, however, is not content to allow Kees to fall out of the twentieth-century literary canon. In The Poetry of Weldon Kees, Irwin ties together elements of biography and literary criticism, spurring renewed interest in Kees as both an individual and as a poet. Irwin acts the part of literary detective, following clues left behind by the poet to make sense of Kees’s fascination with death, disappearance, and the lasting interpretation of an artist’s work. Arguing that Kees’s apparent suicide was a carefully plotted final aesthetic act, Irwin uses the poet’s disappearance as a lens through which to detect and interpret the structures, motifs, and images throughout his poems—as the author intended. The first rigorous literary engagement with Weldon Kees’s poetry, this book is an astonishing reassessment of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted writers.
Download or read book WARD written by Ryan Vine and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rumpus, in a review of his work, labeled poet Ryan Vine “a raconteur,” and his superior story-telling skills are on full display in WARD. The poems are witty, teeming with dark humor, political, playful, and the sardonic tone is pitch-perfect for our times, when we seem to have forgotten that an important survival strategy is the ability to laugh at ourselves. In its heart of hearts, WARD is a book about ethos and mythos, about the creation of a character and the investigation of voice. As one critic, Taylor Collier, wrote: “In the tradition of Kees’s Crusoe poems, Berryman’s Henry poems, and to some degree Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems, [Vine] builds a series of poems around a central character as a means of investigating both interior and exterior contemporary realities.” The TRP Chapbook Series
Download or read book Collected Poems written by Donald Justice and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2004 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of the selected poems of twentieth-century American poet Donald Justice depicting memories of childhood and youth, eulogies for the dead, and reflections of life's disappointments.
Download or read book Robinson Alone written by Kathleen Rooney and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Nebraska in 1914, he followed his polymorphous muse from coast to coast as a musician, librarian, writer, screenwriter, critic, and painter. He is remembered most for his poetry, and for his disappearance. Did he leap to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge in July 1955 or seek a new life in Mexico? In an extraordinary act of identification, poet and essayist Rooney (For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010)) improvises on Kees's most haunting poems, a quartet featuring an alter ego named Robinson. Her loosely biographical, knowledgeably imaginative, and gorgeously atmospheric story in verse portrays Robinson as a dapper,talented, and bedeviled man who conceals his sorrows behind insouciance. Rooney weaves lines from Kees's writings into her bluesy, funny, and scorching lyrics as she follows Robinson from elation to desolation as his wife succumbs to alcoholism and his dreams fade.
Download or read book A Mind Apart written by Mark S. Bauer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: --Book Jacket.
Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature written by Jay Parini and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 2273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.
Download or read book Short Story Index written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 990 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Can Poetry Matter written by Dana Gioia and published by . This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can Poetry Matter? is an important book, and anyone who professes to care about the state of American poetry will have to take it into account. --World Literature Today.
Download or read book In the Suicide s Library written by Tim Bowling and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the hustle and bustle of modern life, the responsibilities of marriage and parenting, and the weight of middle-age get Tim Bowling down, he heads for a bookshelf in search of the solace books and reading can provide. But can the cure become the poison? One day, alone in the Modern Literature stacks of a university library, Bowling opens a tattered copy of Wallace Stevens’s poetry collection Ideas of Order and, on the front flyleaf, finds the elegant ownership signature of Weldon Kees–an obscure American poet, painter, photographer, filmmaker and musician who vanished mysteriously in 1955, an apparent suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. So begins Bowling’s strange eight-month quest into American literature of the 1940s and ’50s and the world of book collecting, a journey branching into a wealth of subjects ranging from the relationship between fathers and daughters, suicide, masculinity, the Internet, the history of printing, bibliomania and the strange effects of midlife and obsession on an otherwise rational mind. Through it all, Bowling faces two central questions: the one that Weldon Kees put to his friend, Pauline Kael, on the day before he vanished–"What keeps you going?"–and, perhaps even more important, is it ever acceptable to steal a book for your own collection?
