Richard Marius – författare

Including the classics of the genre as well as rare period pieces by African Americans and women, and northern and southern patriotic verse and songs, The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry paints the background of the conflict and its literature in Richard Marius's renowned prose, with each poem introduced by a compelling vignette. What emerges is an unparalleled pageant of the war in all its power and sentimentality; the anger of its participants and their yearning for peace.

In this powerful novel—the capstone to Richard Marius’s illustrious career—a gripping double murder propels the small, Bible-obsessed town of Bourbonville, Tennessee, into connection with the wider society opening up in the years following World War II.At the center: Charles Alexander, twenty, groomed from birth by his mother to be a Baptist minister, teetering on the edge of his faith. In his last year of college, working late one night at the newspaper office, he accidentally witnesses the murders. The killer is Hope Kirby, World War II hero, member of a large mountain clan of farmers, who has discovered his wife’s infidelity. Although Kirby’s code of honor requires that he exact vengeance, it won’t allow him to kill an innocent bystander, and Charles goes free, promising not to tell what he’s seen.But Charles does tell, and we watch, fascinated, as a trial, an appeal, and a new terror unleashed on the countryside draw the entire county into the action. Among the people most closely involved: the skillful, overweight, hard-drinking lawyer for the defense; two Baptist preachers—one liberal, one a strict constructionist—each with a secret to hide; a lady banker determinedly headed for trouble; a big-hearted good- old-boy sheriff; Charles’s disturbingly freewheeling, freethinking sometime college girlfriend. Most importantly, we see the Kirby clan: Pappy, whose extraordinary patience, hard work, and self-reliance cause his hardscrabble farm to prosper until he’s turned out by the coming of a national park; and the five Kirby sons, who are trying hard to make a new place for themselves in the town.As these and others play their parts in the affair of honor, we see Charles and the Kirbys begin to reexamine their dramatically opposing but equally encapsulated ways of viewing life—fundamentalist Christian and ancient “code of the hills.” And as the novel draws to its climactic and satisfying close, we see them—and finally the entire town—profoundly, permanently changed.

Most previous biographers of Thomas More have sought to prove him a saint; in this, the first full-scale biography of More in half a century, Richard Marius, a leading Reformation historian, seeks to restore the man. More’s life spanned a tumultuous period in Western history. He was born in 1478 into a society still medieval in its customs and laws. But by the time of his death in 1535 England was already shaken to its depths by the powerful and unsettling ideas of the Renaissance. Marius draws upon important recent research and his profound knowledge of More’s own voluminous writing to make a coherent whole of the life and work of the immensely complex man who was both a product of the times and a singular figure in them.He gives us More the boy—his London childhood, he deep respect for his father, who rose from a tradesman’s background to become a judge of the highest court in the land (a “council of fathers” was to rule More’s kingdom of Utopia) . . . More the youth—sent at about age twelve to serve in the household of the powerful and political Bishop Morton, later struggling to choose between the priesthood and the lures of secular life: marriage and a career in the great world… More the Londoner, the city man—lawyer, graduate of the Inns of Court, member of the rising middle class with its drive for an achievement and position. We see More the humanist man of letter as Marius treats in full his friendship with Erasmus; his now controversial History of Richard III, from which Shakespeare’s Richard derives; and the originals and meanings of his most famous work, Utopia. More the family man is reveal in his relationship with his father, his two wives, and his children as far more complex than the sanctified image of legend.Marius explore More’s public career as Lord Chancellor, as champion of the Catholic church, and finally as martyr to the old faith. He shows us a man who, although he hated and feared tyrants, always believes that authority as a source of order was necessary to the public good—a man who as royal councilor and Lord Chancellor upheld his king until the very moment when, in response to Henry’s final tyranny, he chose “to die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Marius also demonstrates that it was the centuries-old authority of the Catholic Church that More revered; that he was as suspicious of paper supremacy as of any tyranny. The man Marius ultimately reveals is one more passionate and driven (in his family life, his convictions, his persecution of heretics) than the serene hero of A Man For All Seasons. But he is also a man possessed of such wit, integrity and charm that he was loved not only by his family but by almost everyone who knew him. It is the special triumph of this biography that with its rare combination of impeccable scholarship and narrative power, we are brought into the presence of a whole person with all his flaws and virtues, and that by the time More meets his death, he has become familiar and important to us not merely as a historical figure but also as a human being. 

In his third and most powerful work of fiction, the acclaimed author of The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land—biographer also of Thomas More—immerses us in the rich life of an American town, in the subtle and complex experience of becoming an American, in the good and evil of a time gone by.The place is Bourbonville, Tennessee. The time: the end of the First World War. The protagonist: Paul Alexander—Greek by birth, Belgian by adoption, wounded in the war, nearly to death, and now washed up history, by accident, by odd fate, on the edges of Bourbonville, and soon to become part of its center.This is a town where people have known one another for generations, a town full of talkers, compulsive storytellers—thrilled to have a new listener to whom they can pour out local scandals, triumphs, secrets, especially the ongoing saga of the great schism between Moreland Pinkerton, champion of Progress who has drained a swamp to a foundry, and Brian Ledbetter and his Weaver stepsons, independent farmers with the values of an earlier, more agrarian America, who see Pinkerton as a bully and a destroyer. Listening, fascinated, Paul is reluctantly drawn into the life of the town, into the world beyond Mrs. Coolidge’s where he boards, one of seven bachelors. And—through both his work and his friendships—into the battle between Pinkerton (his boss at the foundry) and Ledbetter (whose granddaughter loves him) for the town’s soul.Inevitably, the two factions find themselves in dangerous confrontation where a black war veteran’s attempt to organize the foundry’s black workers erupts into racial animosities and bloody industrial conflict. And, in the midst of these violent events, Paul’s own astonishing story—his exile from Greece and his wartime ordeal—unfolds as he begins to move away from his past into the heart of the town, finding himself eventually part even of its myths.In After the War, Marius has given us a large and moving novel that compels us both by its panoramic amplitude and by its revelation of one fascinating life in the throes of change.

A Short Guide to Writing about History is an ideal complement for any history course intended to teach students to think and write like historians.  This engaging and practical text will teach students how to go beyond reporting the basic dates and facts of their history books and show them how to infuse their writing with their own ideas and unique perspective.

 

Covering brief essays and the documented resource paper, the text explores the writing and researching processes, different modes of historical writing (including argument), and offers guidelines for improving style as well as documenting sources.

Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Luther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a figure as truly as this robust and eloquent life of Luther. A highly regarded historian and biographer and a gifted novelist and playwright, Richard Marius gives us a dazzling portrait of the German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to define the Reformation.Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his flight to an Augustinian monastery and ordination to the outbreak of his revolt against Rome in 1517, the Wittenberg years, his progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg, and his triumphant return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acquaint us with pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, the theology of penance, the timing of Luther's "Reformation breakthrough," the German peasantry in 1525, Müntzer's revolutionaries, the whys and hows of Luther's attack on Erasmus.In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism and whose titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for the development of the modern religious consciousness of the West. In all of this, he also represents tragedy, with the goodness of his works overmatched by their calamitous effects on religion and society.

Over the centuries, biographers of Thomas More have always praised him and made him an example for their own times. He was a man for all seasons. This Tudor prelate and Lord Chancellor of England shared human qualities identifiable in all ages—pride, love, ambition, generosity, hypocrisy, and greed. He was less than common because he was witty and a great storyteller—the best between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Truly, he was a Renaissance man with the contradictions such praise imposes on a towering figure. In Richard Marius's authoritative and engaging portrait, Sir Thomas More, the martyr and brilliant public figure, is a lesson for our season.