William Everson – författare

Praised as the "best modern survey of the silent period" ( New Republic ), this indispensable history tells you everything you need to know about American silent film, from the nickelodeons in the early 1900s to the birth of the first "talkies" in the late 1920s. The author provides vivid descriptions of classic pictures such as The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Sunrise, The Covered Wagon, and Greed , and lucidly discusses their technical and artistic merits and weaknesses. He pays tribute to acknowledged masters like D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Lillian and Dorothy Gish, but he also gives ample attention to previously neglected yet equally gifted actors and directors. In addition, the book covers individual genres, such as the comedy, western gangster, and spectacle, and explores such essential but little-understood subjects as art direction, production design, lighting and camera techniques, and the art of the subtitle. Intended for all scholars, students, and lovers of film, this fascinating book, which features over 150 film stills, provides a rich and comprehensive overview of this unforgettable era in film history.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Written during his time in a monastery, Prodigious Thrust is a work by William Everson that incorporates both prose and poetry with a monastic point of view that integrates the ‘disjunctive elements’ of this collection and informs its character. According to Everson in his preface, “…What was conceived as essentially a book of poetry supported by an autobiographical context, came, through the incorporation of so many digressions, to swell out of all proportion, until the poems survive only as a kind of archipelago awash in an ocean of prose.”

This comprehensive scholarly edition gathers all the verse, including previously unpublished pieces, written by Everson during his eighteen years as a Dominican lay brother, Brother Antoninus. Taken together, these poems provide a passionate record of Everson/Antoninus's struggle to maintain strict vows of celibacy. That struggle is fraught with dramatic tension, as the poet strives to establish a fragile equilibrium between opposed psychic polarities of Spirit and Flesh.