Brief Mention

Editions

A Woman's Wit and Whimsy: The 1833 Diary of Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy . Ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press. 2003. xii, 180 pp. Cloth, $47.50; paper, $18.95.

Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar: The Memoirs of William Henry Corbusier, 1844–1930 . Ed. Robert Wooster. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 2003. xx, 234 pp. $29.95.

The perceptive and often biting journal entries of the youngest daughter of Josiah Quincy—congressman, Boston mayor, and Harvard president—provide an ethnographic journey into the world of nineteenth-century Boston Brahmin society. Quincy portrays both the grandeur and hypocrisy of the Harvard community and the world of Boston's upper crust. From courtship rituals to fashion trends to patriarchal dominance, Quincy exposes and mocks the pretension and superficiality of elite society, in a style reminiscent of one of her favorite authors, Jane Austen.

Yun Gee: Poetry, Writings, Art, Memories . Ed. Anthony W. Lee. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. 2003. xiii, 203 pp. Cloth, $40.00; paper, $24.95.

From his childhood in New York City, to his adolescence in California during the gold rush, to his role as army officer and surgeon in seventeen military assignments, Corbusier's memoirs not only narrate a life but also the nation's rise to global power. As a contract surgeon for the Union army, Corbusier served across the United States and the Philippines. He became a keen observer of people and natural history, eventually publishing ethnographic studies of the Yavapai, the Sioux, and the Shoshoni. His memoir thus also provides an anthropological glimpse at these nations within the nation, touching on his relationship with prominent American Indian figures such as Sarah Winnemucca, Red Cloud, and American Horse.

The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–1930 . By Carl Van Vechten. Ed. Bruce Kellner. Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2003. xvii, 336 pp. $34.95.

In addition to samples of this Chinese American modernist's paintings, poetry, and writing from his arrival in San Francisco to his time in Paris and his final days in New York, this volume includes essays about Yun Gee's work and the era of Chinese Exclusion in the United States that challenged and shaped his art and social vision.

"The Cherokee Night" and Other Plays . By Lynn Riggs. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 2003. xx, 343 pp. Ltd. leatherbound ed., $69.95; paper, $24.95.

During the eight years chronicled here, Carl Van Vechten kept a copious record of his daily activities. The compilation of appointments, alliances, habits, and the related affairs of many of the most notable figures of the cultural period amounts to a vast catalog of 1920s New York culture and a record of the activities of writers, artists, and activists who forged a cultural movement.

Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts . By Mark Twain. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. 2003. xii, 233 pp. $24.95.

The latest collection of the works of one of the most prominent American Indian dramatists of the twentieth century includes the previously unpublished Out of Dust as well as Riggs's most notable Green Grow the Lilacs (adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1943 as the Broadway musical Oklahoma!). A mixed-blood Cherokee who wrote passionately about the people and culture of his home state of Oklahoma, Riggs eventually moved to New York, won a Guggenheim to France, and by the end of his life, had written some thirty plays and scripts for fourteen films, all produced between 1930 and 1955.

Written by Twain in 1898 after his emergence from a deep depression, this satiric play has never before appeared in print or on stage. This edition includes Barry Moser's woodcut illustrations, as well as an essay by Fishkin that helps contextualize this piece within Twain's larger oeuvre. The plot revolves around a group of artists in France who stage the death of a fellow artist in order to drive up the price of his paintings. Farcical scenes of cross-dressing, fake funerals, and lovers' traps...