Rodger L. Tarr – författare

"When I found these cigarettes you had left I thought at first to keep them as a remembrance. But I am far from needing a remembrance." —From Max Perkins's first letter to Elizabeth Lemmon, dated 14 April 1922Maxwell E. Perkins, famed editor of such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe, was a man whose personal and professional lives often intersected. Nowhere is this more evident than in his correspondence with Elizabeth Lemmon, the Virginia socialite who became his long-distance confidante. Despite the platonic nature of their relationship, others realized the intensity of their connection. The letters contained in As Ever Yours, published here for the first time, reveal an epistolary love story—and they provide fresh insights into Perkins the man and Perkins the editor.Max first met Elizabeth in 1922 at the Perkins home in Plainfield, New Jersey. Immediately drawn to her stark beauty and southern charm, he struck up a correspondence with her that lasted until his death in 1947. As Ever Yours contains 121 of Perkins's letters to Lemmon as well as the twenty extant letters from Lemmon to Perkins; the rest are presumed lost or destroyed. Letters from Fitzgerald and Wolfe also shed light on the pair's dynamic relationship. The letters make for compelling reading as Perkins details his personal life in New Jersey and Connecticut and his professional life in the New York publishing world. The writers he discovered, edited, and encouraged at Charles Scribner's Sons emerge as endearing and believable characters, brought to life in Perkins's vivid narrative voice. He is witty, self-deprecating, and painterly in his descriptions of people and locales together with the social milieu of his day. Protected by distance, Max used his letter-writing relationship to unburden himself in a way he could not with his coworkers, his authors, or even his wife—and these letters simultaneously highlight his editorial judgment and disclose his private feelings. Expertly edited by Rodger L. Tarr, As Ever Yours will be important to students and scholars of the history of publishing. The Perkins-Lemmon letters illuminate the thoughts and experiences of the greatest literary editor of the twentieth century.

Born in 1795, Thomas Carlyle was a preeminent figure in Victorian letters. Carlyle was widely reviewed, discussed, praised and criticized during his lifetime, because of his controversial ideas as well as his masterful biographies, histories and extended essays, all forms deemed more canonical in the nineteenth century. Although opinion about him and assessments of his work have fluctuated greatly in the years since his death in 1881, interest in his writings has seldom waned. This volume presents some of the most inaccessible and some of the best critical opinion dealing with four of Carlyle's major works that are arguably most representative of his thought. These includeSartor Resartus (1833-34), The French Revolution (1837), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), and ^IPast and Present^R (1843). Through reviews and essays, this reference work summarizes the critical reception of Carlyle's writings from their initial appearance to the present day.Born in 1795, Thomas Carlyle was one of the preeminent figures of Victorian letters. Carlyle was widely reviewed, discussed, praised and criticized during his lifetime, primarily because of his masterful biographies, histories, and extended essays, all forms deemed more canonical in the nineteenth century. His Sartor Resartus (1833-34) anticipated the spiritual crisis of the Victorian period, engaged the ideas of German philosophers, and was influential in shaping American Transcendentalism and the works of such authors as Emerson and Thoreau. Carlyle's historical writings were consistently praised for their vigorous style, their vividness, and their accuracy. Although opinion about him and assessments of his work have fluctuated greatly in the years since his death in 1881, interest in his writings has seldom waned.This volume presents some of the most inaccessible and some of the best critical opinion dealing with four of Carlyle's major works that are arguably most representative of his thought. These include ^ISartor Resartus^R (1833-34), ^IThe French Revolution^R (1837), ^IOn Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History^R (1841), and ^IPast and Present^R (1843). Through reviews and essays, this reference work summarizes the critical response to Carlyle's writings from their initial appearance to the present day. The volume emphasizes early reviews while the selections of critical articles from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflect mature assessments of Carlyle and include pieces that are not well known or easily accessible. The volume begins with an introductory essay that discusses Carlyle's response to his reviewers, and it closes with a bibliography of major studies.

A collection of Rawlings's 23 published short stories. This comprehensive volume of humorous stories about the South includes the 1932 prize-winning ""Gal Young 'Un"". Portrayals of blacks and of the Florida cracker, situations, and language all depict an era of transition in 20th-century US culture.

Exploring the rich, enduring companionship shared by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Julia Scribner Bigham through never-before-published letters, Marge and Julia provides a revelatory depiction of these two literary women’s experiences in mid-twentieth-century America.Pulitzer Prize–winning author Rawlings was first introduced to Julia Scribner (later Bigham), daughter of publishing magnate Charles Scribner III, shortly after the legendary House of Scribner published The Yearling to runaway success. Though Julia’s New York City life was far removed from the rural world of Cross Creek, the two women remained close until Rawlings’s death in 1953, after which Scribner Bigham served as Rawlings’s literary executor. In this documentary edition of 211 of their letters, Rawlings’s and Bigham’s perspectives on the world are woven through over a decade of intimate discussion and advice about relationships, motherhood, mental health, politics, art, and literature.Supplementing the letters with an introduction, explanatory footnotes, and a reminiscence by Scribner Bigham’s eldest daughter, Hildreth Scribner Bigham, MD, this edition provides historical context and prompts readers to inspect the facets of both women’s complex relationship with issues such as racial discrimination, class, and gender inequality. These letters offer an unprecedented performance of two women’s intimate friendship, one that transcended the limitations of patriarchy as they wrote their lives in letters.

A collection of literary work that shows the artistic development of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author From her first poems and stories to her finely crafted essays as a newspaper and feature writer to the gathering brilliance that began at the outset of her Florida Period, highlighted by the Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling in 1939, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings became, in the words of Margaret Mitchell, America's "born perfect storyteller." Arguing that Rawlings has been underestimated and underappreciated as a great American writer, Rodger Tarr and Brent Kinser present Rawlings's emergence and maturation as an artist. This collection brings together for the first time the work that contributed to her once stellar position as a hero of American letters. Rawlings's childhood publications in the Washington Post and McCall's magazine reveal a budding Romantic if not an emerging Transcendentalist determined to pursue humanity's relationship with nature. As a young storyteller Rawlings had a compelling interest in fairytales, marked by a sense of the comedic and the sentimental, and always the moral. Many of her early stories and poems, especially those written while she was a student at the University of Wisconsin, also reflect her developing feminist spirit, an interest that she continued to pursue as a feature writer for newspapers in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York. Like many writers, Rawlings was self-critical. She was particularly aware of writing as a discipline and as an adult was prone to dismiss her early work as overly wrought. However, as her mature work demonstrates, she owed a great deal to the skills learned in her development as an artist. Rawlings knew that successful writing owed less to inspiration than to hard work, a lesson she experienced repeatedly during the writing of her stories and novels under the guiding hand of her celebrated editor Maxwell E. Perkins. This collection of early work, college writing, newspaper pieces, and stories of life in Florida is an intimate glimpse at an important writer mastering her craft.

The Carlyles at Home and Abroad explores the extensive influence of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle in England and Scotland, Europe, and the United States. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, such as aesthetics, history, biography, literature, travel writing, feminism and race. The result is a volume that offers a fresh assessment of the couple as national and international figures.