Brief Mention

American Plays of the New Woman . Ed. Keith Newlin. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2000. 294 pp. Cloth, $27.50; paper, $14.95.

The six plays in Keith Newlin’s edition stage the contentious debates over the “new woman” in the early twentieth century. Readers will find William Vaughn Moody’s The Great Divide , Rachel Crothers’s A Man’s World , Augustus Thomas’s As a Man Thinks , Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones , Susan Glaspell’s The Outside , and Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry?

Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, Volume One: The Apprentice Years, 1924–1934. Ed. William Bedford Clark. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2000. xxi, 274 pp. $39.95.

William Bedford Clark’s edition gathers together letters from the period of Robert Penn Warren’s “long apprenticeship.” The volume begins with Warren’s earliest extant correspondence during his student years at Vanderbilt and concludes with his acceptance of an appointment at Louisiana State University. The letters document his close friendship with Alan Tate, a failed suicide attempt, his studies at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, his involvement in the emerging Agrarian movement, and his growing determination to seriously pursue fiction and poetry.

“A Wind is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill . Ed. William Davies King. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press. 2000. 328 pp. $49.50.

King’s edition publishes for the first time the prolific correspondence between playwright Eugene O’Neill and pulp novelist Agnes Boulton during the decade of their marriage. The edition includes an introduction by King, as well as introductory notes to each chapter that describe the shifting professional and personal contexts in which the letters were written.

Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Ed. Allen Hibbard. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 1999. xxii, 234 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.00.

Allen Hibbard’s edition collects interviews with William Burroughs that appeared in various publications, both mainstream and alternative. The interviews’ topics range from Burroughs’s thoughts on the Beats to his drug use, literary aesthetics, and shotgun art.

Reprints

Native American Legends of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley . Ed. Katharine B. Judson. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press. 2000. 204 pp. Cloth, $38.00; paper, $18.00.

First published in 1914 as Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes , part of a series compiled for A. C. McClurg, this edition re-presents the tales, legends, and oral histories of the Winnebago, Ojibwa, and Menominee Native American cultures as well as other tribes from the Great Lakes area, the Midwest, and the Mississippi River Valley.

Nigger Heaven. By Carl Van Vechten. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2000. xxxix, 286 pp. Paper, $15.95.

Originally published in 1926, this reissue of Carl Van Vechten’s controversial novel about black intellectual and artistic life during the Harlem Renaissance includes an introduction by Kathleen Pfeiffer.

The Long Dream. By Richard Wright. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press. 2000. xiv, 384 pp. Paper, $15.95.

The Long Dream , originally published in 1958, follows the story of Fishbelly, a young boy growing up amidst a backdrop of Southern racism, and his increasingly tense relationship with his father, black mortician and brothel owner Tyree Tucker.

General

U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 . By Malini Johar Schueller. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 1998. xii, 248 pp. $44.50.

Beginning with readings of eighteenth-century literature of the “Barbary” Orient by authors such as Royall Tyler, Susanna Rowson, and Washington Irving, Schueller proceeds to examine the Near Eastern Orientalist literature of the nineteenth century, including works by DeForest, Melville, and Poe, and concludes with a consideration of “Indic Orientalism” in Emerson and Whitman. Schueller seeks to study the use of “imaginary Orients” in U.S. literature by which the rhetoric of empire, and its various raced and gendered distinctions, are both consolidated and contested.

The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck . By John W. M. Hallock. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 2000. ix, 226 pp. Cloth, $50...