Brief Mention

Editions

The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 17: Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733. Ed. Mark Valeri. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1999. xii, 480 pp. $80.00.

The seventeenth volume in The Works of Jonathan Edwards contains eighteen sermons, many previously unpublished, composed by Edwards in his new role as a pastor in Northampton.

Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express: Articles and Sketches by America’s Favorite Humorist. Ed. Joseph B. McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasberg. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press. 1999. xlvii, 309 pp. $30.00.

“Being a stranger, it would be immodest and unbecoming in me to suddenly and violently assume the editorship of the Buffalo Express without a single explanatory word of comfort or encouragement,” began Mark Twain in the first of his pieces for the newspaper he bought part interest in, apparently with the hope of impressing his fiancée. McCullough and McIntire-Strasburg offer the first complete edition of the tales, editorials, and articles that served as a kind of writer’s apprenticeship for Twain.

Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene. Ed. Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 1999. xliv, 226 pp. $50.00.

This volume features eighteen articles by James culled from magazines, newspapers, and speeches. His subjects include the possibility of life after death; World War I and British imperialism; political crises in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and South Africa; and the manners and speech of American women.

Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf”: A Screenplay. By Robert Rossen. Ed. Rocco Fumento and Tony Williams. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. 1998. xxvi, 199 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95.

London’s 1904 novel about a seal-harvesting vessel commanded by a power-mad tyrant was adapted for the screen no less than eight times. Rocco Fumento and Tony Williams have edited the screenplay of the eighth adaptation. Written by Robert Rossen, the Michael Curtiz film was released in 1941 and starred Edward G. Robinson as Wolf Larsen.

“Salvation Gap” and Other Western Classics. By Owen Wister. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 1999. xxv, 280 pp. Paper, $15.00.

In 1893 Harper’s dispatched Owen Wister to write “short stories of Western adventure” with the instructions that they should be both “thrilling” and grounded in “real incident.” The eight tales collected in “Salvation Gap” and Other Western Classics are the result of that assignment and document the early career of the author who went on to write The Virginian. Richard W. Etulain wrote the introduction.

A Literary Friendship: Correspondence between Caroline Gordon and Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press. 1999. xxxvi, 116 pp. $22.50.

This volume publishes, for the first time, the 1930–1939 correspondence between Southern novelist Caroline Gordon and the English author and editor Ford Madox Ford.

Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Ed. Lois Palken Rudnick. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press. 1999. xxii, 265 pp. Paper, $17.95.

Mabel Dodge Luhan was a patron and intimate of social reformers and literary luminaries (including Gertrude Stein and D. H. Lawrence), an early popularizer of psychoanalysis (she penned a column on the talking cure for Hearst’s newspapers), and a woman who eventually found love and salvation in Taos, New Mexico. Lois Palken Rudnick makes Luhan’s autobiography available for the first time since it appeared in four installments between 1924 and 1937, in a usefully abridged form.

Man from Babel. By Eugene Jolas. Ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1999. xxxix, 326 pp. $30.00.

“We went to the Shakespeare Bookshop in the Rue de l’Odeon and asked Sylvia Beach to speak in our favor to James Joyce. This she very kindly did and within a few days, overjoyed, we held in our hands a bulky manuscript bearing the title “Work in Progress.” The “work in progress” was Finnegans Wake and the author of the reminiscence is Eugene Jolas, American journalist, poet, and, most famously, the editor of the expatriate journal transition...