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Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute
by Peter DickinsonSamuel Barber is one of America's most popular classical composers. His widely beloved works include "Adagio for Strings" and Knoxville: Summer of 1915 . The main source for Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute is a panoply of vivid and eminently readable interviews by Peter Dickinson for a BBC Radio 3 documentary in 1981. The interviewees include Barber's friends, fellow composers, and performers, notably Gian Carlo Menotti, Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Virgil Thomson, soprano Leontyne Price, and pianist John Browning. The book also includes three of the very few interviews extant with Barber himself. Dickinson contributes substantial chapters on Barber's early life and on Barber's reception in England. The book has a foreword by the distinguished composer and admirer of Barber, John Corigliano. Peter Dickinson, British composer and pianist, has written or edited numerous books about twentieth-century music, including CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage (University of Rochester Press) and three books published by Boydell Press: The Music of Lennox Berkeley; Copland Connotations; and Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter.
Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy (Music in American Life)
by Howard PollackA pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. Barber’s works have since become standard concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber’s life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber’s path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings, the Violin Concerto, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, stand alongside revealing accounts of the music’s commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber’s encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer’s decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.
Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music
by Barbara B. HeymanSamuel Barber (1910-1981) was one of the most important and honored American composers of the twentieth century. Writing in a great variety of musical forms--symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal music, and chamber music--he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes such famous compositions as the Adagio for Strings, the orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, and his two operas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, a commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. Generously documented by letters, sketchbooks, original musical manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues and performers with whom he worked, this is the first book to cover Barber's entire career and all of his compositions. The biographical material on Barber is closely interspersed with a discussion of his music, displaying Barber's creative processes at work from his early student compositions to his mature masterpieces. Heyman also provides the social context in which this major composer grew: his education, how he built his career, the evolving musical tastes of American audiences, his relationship to musical giants like Serge Koussevitzky, and the role of radio in the promotion of his music. A testament to the significance of the new Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important American musical figure.
Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts
by Conor CarvilleSamuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett's knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after. <P><P>Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, this book traces in forensic detail the development of Beckett's understanding of painting in particular, as that understanding developed from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In doing so it demonstrates that Beckett's thinking about art and aesthetics radically changes in the course of his life, often directly responding to the intellectual and historical contexts in which he found himself. Moving fluently between art history, philosophy, literary analysis and historical context, Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts rethinks the trajectory of Beckett's career, and reorients his relationship to modernism, late modernism and the avant-gardes.<P> Draws on a wide range of new sources, both published and unpublished.<P> Demonstrates the changes in Beckett's thinking about art and aesthetics over his career.<P> Reorients Beckett's relationships with modernism, late modernism and the avant-gardes.
Samuel De Champlain (Famous Explorers Ser.)
by Claude HurwiczA biography of the French explorer who founded Quebec, discovered Lake Champlain, and was called the Father of New France.
Samuel Fuller: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)
by Gerald PearyIn the early twentieth century, the art world was captivated by the imaginative, original paintings of Henri Rousseau, who, without formal art training, produced works that astonished not only the public but great artists such as Pablo Picasso. Samuel Fuller (1912–1997) is known as the “Rousseau of the cinema,” a mostly “B” genre Hollywood moviemaker deeply admired by “A” filmmakers as diverse as Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and John Cassavetes, all of them dazzled by Fuller’s wildly idiosyncratic primitivist style. A high school dropout who became a New York City tabloid crime reporter in his teens, Fuller went to Hollywood and made movies post-World War II that were totally in line with his exploitative newspaper work—bold, blunt, pulpy, excitable. The images were as shocking, impolite, and in-your-face as a Weegee photograph of a gangster bleeding on a sidewalk. Fuller, who made twenty-three features between 1949 and 1989, is the very definition of a “cult” director, appreciated by those with a certain bent of subterranean taste, a penchant for what critic Manny Farber famously labeled as “termite art.” Here are some of the crazy, lurid, comic book titles of his movies: Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Verboten!, and Pickup on South Street. Fuller isn’t for everybody. His fans have to appreciate low-budget genre films, including westerns and war movies, and make room for some hard-knuckle, ugly bursts of violence. They also have to make allowance for lots of broad, crass acting, and scripts (all Fuller-written) that can be stiff, sometimes campy, often laboriously didactic. Fuller is for those who love cinema—images that jump, shout, and dance. As he put it in his famous cigar-chomping cameo, acting in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965): “Film is like a battleground . . . love, hate, violence, death. In a single word: emotion.” After directing, Fuller's greatest skill was conversation. He could talk, talk, talk, from his amazing experiences fighting in World War II to the time his brother-in-law dated Marilyn Monroe, and vivid stories about his moviemaking. Samuel Fuller: Interviews is not only informative about the filmmaker’s career but sheer fun, following the wild, uninhibited stream of Fuller’s chatter. He was an incredible storyteller, and no matter what the interview was, he had stories galore for all sorts of readers, not just for academics and film historians.
Samuel Johnson
by Jeffrey MeyersFord Madox Ford declared Samuel Johnson "the most tragic of all our major literary figures." Blessed with a formidable intellect and a burning passion for ideas, Johnson also struggled throughout his life with mental instability and numerous physical defects. One of the most illustrious figures of the English literary tradition, Johnson made his fame as poet, essayist, critic, dictionary-maker, conversationalist, and all-around larger-than-life personality. His success was all the greater for the adversity he had to overcome in achieving it.Drawing on a lifetime of study of Johnson and his era, as well as a wide array of new archival materials, noted biographer Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of one of the great geniuses of English letters. Johnson emerges in his portrait as a mass of contradictions: lazy and energetic, aggressive and tender, melancholy and witty, comforted yet tormented by religion. He was physically repulsive and slovenly in dress and habits, but his social ideas were progressive and humane-he strongly opposed slavery and the imperial exploitation of indigenous peoples. He gave generously to the poor and homeless, rescued prostitutes, and defended criminals who'd been condemned to hang. But these charitable acts could not dispel the darkness that clouded his world: overwhelming guilt and fear of eternal damnation.A masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figure, this book reintroduces a new generation of readers to the heroic Dr. Johnson.
Samuel Johnson
by MeyersFord Madox Ford declared Samuel Johnson "the most tragic of all our major literary figures. ” Blessed with a formidable intellect and a burning passion for ideas, Johnson also struggled throughout his life with mental instability and numerous physical defects. One of the most illustrious figures of the English literary tradition, Johnson made his fame as poet, essayist, critic, dictionary-maker, conversationalist, and all-around larger-than-life personality. His success was all the greater for the adversity he had to overcome in achieving it. Drawing on a lifetime of study of Johnson and his era, as well as a wide array of new archival materials, noted biographer Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of one of the great geniuses of English letters. Johnson emerges in his portrait as a mass of contradictions: lazy and energetic, aggressive and tender, melancholy and witty, comforted yet tormented by religion. He was physically repulsive and slovenly in dress and habits, but his social ideas were progressive and humane--he strongly opposed slavery and the imperial exploitation of indigenous peoples. He gave generously to the poor and homeless, rescued prostitutes, and defended criminals who’d been condemned to hang. But these charitable acts could not dispel the darkness that clouded his world: overwhelming guilt and fear of eternal damnation. A masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figure, this book reintroduces a new generation of readers to the heroic Dr. Johnson.
Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading: Biographical Writings: Soldiers, Scholars, And Friends (The\yale Edition Of The Works Of Samuel Johnson Ser.)
by Robert DeMaria Jr.The surprising influence of one of the greatest readers in English literature. If readers of the twentieth century feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of writing and information, they can find in Samuel Johnson a sympathetic companion. Johnson's career coincided with the rapid expansion of publishing in England—not only in English, but in Latin and Greek; not only in books, but in reviews, journals, broadsides, pamphlets, and books about books. In 1753 Johnson imagined a time when "writers will, perhaps, be multiplied, till no readers will be found." Three years later, he wrote that England had become "a nation of authors" in which "every man must be content to read his book to himself."In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, Robert DeMaria considers the surprising influence of one of the greatest readers in English literature. Johnson's relationship to books not only reveals much about his life and times, DeMaria contends, but also provides a dramatic counterpoint to modern reading habits. As a superior practitioner of the craft, Johnson provides a compelling model for how to read—indeed, he provides different models for different kinds of reading. DeMaria shows how Johnson recognized early that not all reading was alike—some requiring intense concentration, some suited for cursory glances, some requiring silence, some best appreciated amid the chatter of a coffeehouse. Considering the remarkable range of Johnson's reading, DeMaria discovers in one extraordinary career a synoptic view of the subject of reading.
Samuel Johnson: A Biography
by Peter MartinThe first new biography for a generation of one of the great figures of English literaturePoet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, conversationalist and wit, Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. Our view of Johnson has been overwhelmingly shaped by James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, the most famous biography in the English language. But invaluable as Boswell is as a source, he should not be the last word.This new biography illuminates the Johnson that Boswell never knew: the awkward youth, the unsuccessful schoolmaster, the eccentric marriage, his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living, the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. Very much the outsider, rather than the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense.Using material unknown to previous biographers, Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived, caused by his severe melancholia and his physical diseases. He explores Johnson's role in the publishing and printing world of the time and he reveals how important women were to Johnson throughout his life. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable and sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.
Samuel Johnson: A Biography
by Peter MartinThe first new biography for a generation of one of the great figures of English literaturePoet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, conversationalist and wit, Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. Our view of Johnson has been overwhelmingly shaped by James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, the most famous biography in the English language. But invaluable as Boswell is as a source, he should not be the last word.This new biography illuminates the Johnson that Boswell never knew: the awkward youth, the unsuccessful schoolmaster, the eccentric marriage, his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living, the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. Very much the outsider, rather than the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense.Using material unknown to previous biographers, Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived, caused by his severe melancholia and his physical diseases. He explores Johnson's role in the publishing and printing world of the time and he reveals how important women were to Johnson throughout his life. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable and sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.
Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings: A Tercentenary Celebration
by Samuel JohnsonThanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. He is more often quoted than read, his name invoked in party conversation on such diverse topics as marriage, sleep, deceit, mental concentration, and patriotism, to generally humorous effect. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and lexicographer: a gifted writer possessed of great force of mind and wisdom. Writing a century after Johnson, Ruskin wrote of Johnson’s essays: He “taught me to measure life, and distrust fortune…he saved me forever from false thoughts and futile speculations.” Peter Martin here presents “the heart of Johnson,” a selection of some of Johnson’s best moral and critical essays. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Also included are Johnson’s great moral fable, Rasselas; the Prefaces to the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; and selections from Lives of the Poets. Together, these works—allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns—are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.
Samuel L. Jackson
by Stacia Deutsch Rhody CohonEach book in the "Sharing the American Dream: Overcoming Adversity" series features a biography of the challenges these people faced during their lives. The series is interesting, lively, accurate, factual, and up-to-date. Information about each celebrity's personal lives and romantic relationships, in addition to his or her professional achievements is included, as well as individual philanthropic efforts.
Samuel M. Gore: Blessed with Tired Hands
by Barbara GaunttBorn in Coolidge, Texas, Samuel Marshall Gore was the sixth of ten children born to a Baptist preacher and a mother described as “an angel.” From early childhood, Samuel Gore remembers enjoying making things, and gives credit to his mother and grandmother for his interest in art. Gore went on to be an art teacher and professor for more than fifty years, mostly at Mississippi College in Clinton, Mississippi. He has shown work in exhibitions and galleries for more than forty years. In 2012 the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. In the first part of this volume, Barbara Gauntt traces how a concept in the mind of the artist comes to execution. Gore uses sketches on scraps of paper to inform studies in clay, as the piece Christ, Fulfillment of the Law begins to take its inspired shape. The project, expected to take about a year, lasts nearly two as Gore works to capture the constantly changing image forming in his mind. The 12' x 8' bronze, bas relief sculpture, a sister piece to Moses, Deliverer of the Law commissioned for the Mississippi College School of Law, moves from a small work area in the sculptor’s home to a shop on his property. There he builds the full-size piece on an armature of wood, foam board, and netting covered with clay. From chaos arises the beauty of detailed faces and a work of art that tells a story. The second section of the book covers the artist’s career from the late 1940s into the twenty-first century. Superb photographs of both two- and three-dimensional pieces show the artist’s diverse style and talent. Gore says that he “want[s] people to put their hands on [his] sculpture” because that is how he experiences his art. Gore sees no end in sight to his work. Moses started preaching at the age of eighty, so Gore figures that he is just getting started. This volume features detailed information about all of the artwork included; an interview with Samuel Gore in which the artist discusses his career, technique, and philosophy; a timeline of his life and career; and a foreword by noted Mississippi artist and former student, Wyatt Waters.
Samuel Morse, That's Who!: The Story of the Telegraph and Morse Code
by Tracy Nelson MaurerWriter Tracy Nelson Maurer and illustrator El Primo Ramón present a lively picture book biography of Samuel Morse that highlights how he revolutionized modern technology. Back in the 1800s, information traveled slowly. Who would dream of instant messages? Samuel Morse, that’s who! Who traveled to France, where the famous telegraph towers relayed 10,000 possible codes for messages depending on the signal arm positions—only if the weather was clear? Who imagined a system that would use electric pulses to instantly carry coded messages between two machines, rain or shine? Long before the first telephone, who changed communication forever? Samuel Morse, that’s who! This dynamic and substantive biography celebrates an early technology pioneer.
Samuel Peppard and the Wind Wagon
by Stephanie M. BearceMillwright Samuel Peppard is ready to test his wind wagon invention on the prairie plains of the Midwest.
Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester
by Nigel PickfordA true story of royal intrigue—with famed diarist Samuel Pepys as the main protagonist—as a fatal shipwreck on the shores of Restoration Britain sparks a mystery that now may finally be solved.In 1682, Charles II invited his scandalous younger brother, James, Duke of York, to return from exile and take his rightful place as heir to the throne. To celebrate, the future king set sail in a fleet of eight ships destined for Edinburgh, where he would reunite with his young pregnant wife. Yet disaster struck en route, somewhere off the Norfolk coast. The royal frigate carrying James and his entourage sank, causing some two hundred sailors and courtiers to perish. The diarist Samuel Pepys had been asked to sail with James but refused the invitation, preferring to travel in one of the other ships. Why? What did he know that others did not? Religious and political tensions were rife in the years leading up to the wreck of the Gloucester. James was a Catholic, as was his wife, and there was a large constituency who wished them dead. Plots and conspiracies abounded. The Royal Navy was itself in disarray, badly equipped and poorly organised. Could someone on board be to blame for the sinking, either from malice or incompetence? Nigel Pickford&’s compelling account of the catastrophe draws on a richness of historical material including letters, diaries and ships&’ logs, revealing for the first time the full drama and tragic consequences of a shipwreck that shook Restoration Britain.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
by Claire TomalinFor a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.<P> Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys's early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys's singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Samuel Richardson
by Betty A. SchellenbergSamuel Richardson (1689-1761) was a highly regarded printer and influential novelist when he produced his final work of fiction, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Like his other novels, it was written in epistolary form, reflecting his lifelong interest in letter writing and the letter as a genre. Covering the period 1750-1754, many of these fully annotated letters are published from manuscript for the first time, or have been restored to their complete original form. Recording Richardson's relationships with leading cultural figures including Samuel Johnson, Colley Cibber and Elizabeth Carter, the volume reveals his support for other authors while struggling to complete his own 'story of a Good Man'. This publishing saga also incorporates Richardson's responses to the Irish piracy of his novel, and his exchanges with anonymous fans, including those who attacked the novel's tolerance for Catholicism and those who pleaded for a sequel.
Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing
by Louise CurranThis fascinating study examines Samuel Richardson's letters as important works of authorial self-fashioning. It analyses the development of his epistolary style; the links between his own letter-writing practice and that of his fictional protagonists; how his correspondence is highly conscious of the spectrum of publicity; and how he constructed his letter collections to form an epistolary archive for posterity. Looking backwards to earlier epistolary traditions, and forwards, to the emergence of the lives-in-letters mode of biography, the book places Richardson's correspondence in a historical continuum. It explores how the eighteenth century witnesses a transition, from a period in which an author would rarely preserve personal papers to a society in which the personal lives of writers become privileged as markers of authenticity in the expanded print market. It argues that Richardson's letters are shaped by this shifting relationship between correspondence and publicity in the mid-eighteenth century.
Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle (Black Lives)
by R. J. BlackettThe rediscovery of a pivotal figure in Black history and his importance and influence in the struggle against slavery and discrimination Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He was extolled by his contemporary Frederick Douglass for his &“depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness.&” Until now, his story has been largely untold. Ward, a newspaper editor, Congregational minister, and advocate for the temperance movement, was considered one of the leading orators of his time. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 he fled to Canada, where he lectured widely to improve conditions for formerly enslaved people who had settled there. Ward then went to Britain as an agent of the Canadian Antislavery Society and published his influential book Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro. He never returned to the United States, and he died in obscurity in Jamaica. Despite Ward&’s prominent role in the abolitionist movement, his story has been lost because of the decades he spent in exile. In this book, R. J. M. Blackett brings light to Ward&’s life and his important role in the struggle against slavery and discrimination, and to the personal price he paid for confronting oppression.
Samuel Smedley: Connecticut Privateer
by Jackson KuhlA biography of an eighteenth-century New England privateer that “takes a deep dive into the life and adventures of this colorful figure” (Fairfield Sun).From the shores of Long Island Sound to the high seas of the West Indies, against British warships and letters of marque, Samuel Smedley left a stream of smoke and blood as he took prisoners and prizes alike. At twenty-three years old, Smedley, a Fairfield, Connecticut native, enlisted as a lieutenant of marines on the Connecticut ship Defence during the American Revolution. Less than a year later he was her captain, scouring the seas for British prey. In this biography, Jackson Kuhl delves into the life and times of this Patriot, sea captain and privateer.
Samuel Wilbert Tucker: The Story of a Civil Rights Trailblazer and the 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In
by Nancy Noyes SilcoxRefused a library card to borrow books, Tucker organized the earliest documented civil rights sit-in at a public library on August 21, 1939. This nonviolent act of civil disobedience challenged "Jim Crow" segregation twenty years before the sit-ins of the 1960s. This biography of NAACP lawyer S.W. Tucker, an unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement, tells how his life and work were dedicated to ending racial discrimination and securing racial justice. He argued cases against over 50 Virginia school boards in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate public schools. In his 1968 case, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that school boards could no longer delay desegregating public schools and had to show immediate progress.
Samuel de Champlain
by Elizabeth MacleodMeet Samuel de Champlain, explorer. The story of his exploration of the unknown lands of New France and his many adventures there is told in level-appropriate language.
Samuel de Champlain
by Jonathan Kaplansky Francine LegaréA navigator and cartographer, Samuel de Champlain’s passion was for America, which he struggled to explore and have recognized. He still dreamed of reaching India, with its spices and its many riches, by continuing further to the West. But the land called New France – a harsh land from India – was his greatest love. He defended it fiercely to those in power in France and was responsible for its development. Champlain thus ensured the birth of the country that today is Canada. He is undisputedly the Father of New France.