Author Spotlight: Patricia Dunlavy Valenti Part II

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871, by Patricia Dunlavy Valenti

Q. Your much-anticipated second volume of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life, has now been published. Who are the intended readers for your book?

A. I think my biography of Sophia will appeal to the general reader, and it will be accessible even to someone who has not read volume I. It’s clear why contemporary novels such as Z, or The Paris Wife, or Mrs. Poe have gained such popularity. The public craves access to the lives of women kept in the shadows by their famous author-husbands. But my book also presents really new scholarship in the areas of American history, gender and literary studies, and what I like to call the domestic politics of authorship, that complex influence of one spouse upon the other in the production of art. Scholars who have already reviewed Volume II attest to its contribution to these areas.

Q. Did your research and writing of this volume uncover anything completely unexpected?

A. I knew the issues that would dominate Sophia’s life between 1848 and 1871, when she died in England, but I had been unaware of the scope and significance of some of them. In terms of specifics, I had no idea that The Marble Faun, the last novel Nathaniel published, required so much of Sophia’s effort. Her life was entwined with his for nearly twenty-six years, and after his death, she lived another seven years with the burden of his bad financial decisions and failures as a writer during last decade of his life. Looking at Nathaniel Hawthorne from Sophia’s perspective reveals a side to him that was entirely ignored by his biographers.

Q. Are you saying that Sophia saw her husband in an unflattering light?

A. No, I’m not. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote to Sophia that she had “a beauty making eye.” He was referring to her artistic talent, but he coined a phrase that serves us well in understanding her character. She was optimistic to the core. She persisted in seeing Nathaniel, their children, and her marriage as the epitome of domestic bliss. Among her surviving thousands of pages of letters and journals, not one word criticizing her husband can be found. But actions tell a different story than words.

Q. What do you mean?

A. Sophia’s emotional appetite was not satisfied by marriage and motherhood. She and Nathaniel spent a good deal of time apart. Their lack of money sometimes forced them to live separately, and when they had money to spare, Nathaniel took regular summer vacations without her. While the Hawthornes were living in England, Sophia developed a pulmonary problem and went to sunny, warmer Portugal to live in the home of John Louis O’Sullivan. She became alarmingly fond—from her husband’s point of view--of this vexing figure in America history. Then, when the Hawthornes lived in Italy, Nathaniel frequently remained in their apartment while Sophia enjoyed Rome’s museums and historic sites with a group of women who were part of a thriving lesbian community. When Nathaniel’s health was failing, Sophia urged him to take one after another trip, claiming that a change of scene would restore his health. During this same period, she developed intense feelings for Annie Fields, the young, beautiful wife of Nathaniel’s publisher. Sophia also became deeply attached to General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who had been appointed by President Lincoln to oversee the return of prisoners during the Civil War.

Q. You make her sound like a scarlet woman, or like Hawthorne’s character who wore the scarlet letter.

A.That would be a huge over-simplification of Sophia’s very complex and nuanced relationships. But there is no doubt that Nathaniel Hawthorne incorporated many of her traits into his female characters, particularly into one of the best-known female characters in American literature. Like Hester Prynne--who wished that her timid, secret lover would proclaim his love publicly--Sophia bristled at the secrecy Nathaniel imposed upon their lengthy engagement. While Nathaniel was writing The Scarlet Letter, Sophia was the breadwinner, earning money for their household expenses by selling her decorative arts, a prototype for Hester’s ability to support herself and her child with needlework. And among other parallels, Sophia’s tenacious protection of her children suggests Hester’s behavior with Pearl.

Q. Why did Sophia need to protect her children?

A. All mothers need to protect their children, but at Sophia’s particular moment in history, medicine did little to prevent childhood mortality. Religious belief in the afterlife was waning and no longer provided mothers like Sophia with consolation when a child died. Sophia attempted to stave off illness and other harm through diet and hygiene; she wanted her children to develop moral character without the scare tactics of Calvinism. She refused to use any form of corporal punishment. In many ways, her story as a mother is a very contemporary one. She was a helicopter mother before helicopters were invented. The sad truth is, that even with the best intentions, there are unfortunate consequences.

Q. How so?

A. You’ll have to read both volumes of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life for the full answer. But I’ll say here that Sophia’s children came of age during the Civil War, when many of their counterparts were sacrificing their lives for the abolition of slavery. Sarah Shaw, the mother of Robert Gould Shaw, who was slaughtered in battle with his African American soldiers, was Sophia’s good friend. The Alcotts were Sophia’s longtime neighbors, and Louisa May suffered lasting effects from the disease she contracted while she nursed Union soldiers. Examining Sophia’s attitudes as a mother—and one opposed to the Civil War—helps us better understand the sacrifices of others who were, or no longer could be, her friends.


You can read about Volume 1 at the earlier Author Spotlight for Patricia Dunlavy Valenti.

Author Spotlight: Patricia Dunlavy Valenti

 
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume I, 1809-1847, by Patricia Dunlavy Valenti


Q. What prompted you to write a biography of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne?

A. I first encountered her when I wrote my dissertation on the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I was intrigued by his pictorial technique; that made me curious about his artist wife, Sophia, and I wondered how she might have influenced his writing. I discovered that she was a professional artist in the first half of the nineteenth century when a woman artist was a rarity in America. She exhibited her work at the Boston Athenaeum. Her mentors were some of the most important artists of her day: Washington Allston, Chester Harding, and Thomas Doughty. She was, in fact, very different from the person described in biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her life deserved to be presented on its own terms, in her own biography.

Q. How was she portrayed in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s biographies?

A. Nathaniel’s biographies presented Sophia as an amateur, dilettante painter when in fact she possessed the hallmarks of a professional artist. But in terms of her character, the misrepresentation was even more profound, thanks to her husband. Nathaniel had invented a persona for Sophia: the timid, frail “Dove.” This image stuck with his biographers, but in reality she was more practical, worldly-wise, and daring than he.

Q. How so?

A. For example, before they met, she traveled to Cuba--another uncommon activity for young women at that time. There she kept a three-volume, eight-hundred-page journal. This Cuba Journal is an ecstatic, transcendental response to nature, but it also reads like a novel of manners with lively narratives about her experiences, including those with a handsome suitor. Sophia rode horses during the day and waltzed at night, something strictly forbidden to proper young women. Her sister Mary called her a “tinderbox.” This was Sophia as she presented herself in her Cuba Journal, which Nathaniel read before he met her in person. Sophia’s life was radically different from his. He had traveled only as far Niagara Falls; he had been living in a room in his mother’s house for nearly a decade. So though he was attracted to Sophia, she was also a bit threatening. It seems as if he wanted to tame her by referring to her as his “Dove.”

Q. The Cuba Journal must be a fascinating piece of writing if it captivated one of the most prominent writers in American literature. Has it been published?

A. Not on paper, but now it can be read online at the digital archives of the New York Public Library, where it is housed in the Berg Collection. Isaac Gewirtz, curator of that collection, determined that the Cuba Journal should be digitized in order to conserve it and to make it widely available. It had become very fragile, and scholars increasingly want to read it. I was fortunate enough to read the actual Cuba Journal. Sophia really knew how to draw a reader into life on a plantation in Cuba in the early 1830s, so much so that I recall feeling somewhat disoriented when I would leave the library to take a break. It somehow felt wrong that I was really in the middle of the noise and bustle of Manhattan and not in a tropical coffee plantation.

Q. You mention Sophia’s discussion of nature and social life. You don’t mention that she wrote about Cuban politics or slavery on the island. Did she?

A. Sophia believed that Providence would right all wrongs, and she was disquietingly oblivious to the moral evil of slavery. She was certainly on the wrong side of history in that regard. But her sisters and most of her friends were committed abolitionists. Her arguments with them illuminate a painful moment in American history.

Q. Let’s return to the question of Sophia’s influence upon her husband’s writing. Can you say exactly what that was?

A. Nathaniel used his pet names for Sophia—Dove and Phoebe—for characters in two of his novels. That’s an exact, but trivial, example of her presence in his writing. Her more significant influences are far more pervasive and subtle. For example, Nathaniel’s female characters became more sensuous and complex after Sophia entered his life. Where he saw darkness and shadows, she saw light. The tension between their worldviews filtered into his fiction. One of his most famous stories, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” was written shortly after they married and should be read against the Cuba Journal because that story absorbs the tone of Cuba’s brilliant, lush tropical scenery. I examine this story’s debt to the Cuba Journal in Chapter 20, “More Poison in Thy Nature.”

Q. One reviewer of your book called it a hybrid. Why?

A. Volume I has, and Volume II will have, more literary analysis than most biographies. But literary analysis is essential when dealing with a subject such as Sophia because writing was tantamount to living for her. I mentioned the holdings of the Berg Collection earlier. No author has a greater number of items in the Berg Collection than Sophia, and her manuscripts are found in major collections or in private hands all over the country. The scope of her writing is enormous; it’s not just a source for her biography but a major topic in it.

Q. What else can you hint about the upcoming Volume II?

A. I think there will be some surprises for scholars and general readers alike. After Sophia’s marriage, Nathaniel squelched her artistic career, and she turned her creative energies into raising her children at a moment when the notions of mothering were in flux. The Hawthornes’ storied marital love did not confine Sophia’s passionate affections. She formed deep attachments to men other than her husband and to one woman. Sophia continued to be an interesting travel writer, and she documented her life in the British Isles, Italy, Portugal, and Germany. Sophia’s perspective of her husband during his declining years reveals him as he has never before been seen. Much of the second volume is set during the Civil War and its aftermath. Volume II will be of interest to anyone who wants an insight into that period of national crisis. Sophia’s story could not be confined to a single volume.

Author Spotlight: Caroline Zilboorg

The Masks of Mary Renault: A Literary Biography by Caroline Zilboorg

Q. What initially sparked your interest in Mary Renault?

In the process of writing this book, I have often been asked how I came to choose my subject. Most people with whom I discuss it recognize Mary Renault as the author of historical novels about the classical world; many confess to remembering a title or two; and some vividly recall The Last of the Wine, her first “Greek” novel, published in 1956, or The King Must Die, the first of her two books about the mythical Theseus, or her sweeping trilogy about Alexander the Great. I was drawn to her by none of these. Indeed, I dimly recall looking at The King Must Die in my school library and deciding that it was about experience so distant from my own that I made another choice.

Then, after a summer of European travel in 1992, my family and I headed to Berlin for eight days in a pension on Knesebeck Strasse. We arrived early on a sunny August afternoon, but we found the doors locked and no one at home. As we strolled about in front of the building, waiting for the proprietor, I perused the display tables under the awning of a nearby bookshop, discovering among the secondhand volumes an alluring paperback copy of The Charioteer. The trove of books we had brought with us was nearly completely read, and I was very tempted by this one, even at six Deutschmarks. My children (two boys, then aged thirteen and twelve, and two girls, then nine and seven) needed to use the lavatory, so we wandered into the shop, were directed through and out into a nineteenth-century courtyard, to a small room on the left. I had seen the saleswoman raise her eyebrows at my request, but I was used to that: Any mother with four young children is used to such looks—there seem so many of us. When we returned to the shop, however, my husband beckoned me outside into the street. He was astonished; he had found a book he had long been seeking, Käte Kollwitz’s Tagebucher, but when he took it up to the counter to pay, he was told that he could not buy it: the shop was for “women only.” I should have guessed from its name: Lilith.

Leaving my boys to wait with my husband, I went back in to purchase The Charioteer, for I was now fascinated. The cover featured a pastel illustration of a gentle young man with auburn hair. Dressed in a khaki uniform, he looked down and off to the left, while behind him a crutch was propped. The back cover advertised the story as a “moving and sensitive portrayal of a modern homosexual relationship.” I had thought Renault only wrote about great men in the ancient world. What was this “modern” novel about the Second World War? And what was a book about a homosexual man doing in a lesbian bookshop? What, in fact, was Mary Renault doing there?

After hours of touring Berlin, I read The Charioteer late into the night over the next few days. It is a wonderful novel, and I realized by the end that it was, in complex ways I did not then understand, related to the Greek novels advertised inside as “Other titles by the same author.” I had no idea until several months later that this was the last book she would set in twentieth century England, but I already felt that, when I finished the project I was then working on, I wanted to write something on Mary Renault.

Q. What do you think would have happened in 1939 if Mary decided to publish her first book under her real name, instead of a pseudonym?

Mary Renault is, of course, not her real name. Mary Renault was born Eileen Mary Challans in London in September 1905.  She died in 1983 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she had lived with her partner, Julie Mullard, since leaving England in 1948.

Nobody ever called Renault ‘Eileen’, and until she went up to Oxford University, Renault was known to her family and schoolmates as ‘Molly’.  The nickname suggested someone diminutive and pretty and Irish, the cute little girl her mother always wanted, but Renault was none of these things, and claimed the more adult name of ‘Mary’ as she began her studies at St Hughes’ College in 1925.  It’s not surprising, having finally named herself and claimed an identity of her own, that she would retain ‘Mary’ when she chose a pseudonym at the time of the publication of her first book, The Purposes of Love, in 1939.  But why change her surname, her family name, the name she had inherited, as it were, from her doctor father? 

When she began her medical studies in 1933 Renault could not have known the extraordinary demands nursing would make on her, but she must have known that she was choosing a profession that would place her on a daily basis in close contact with the reality of physical bodies, an experience quite different from her rather abstract study of literature at St Hughes’.  She must also have known about the uniform she would be compelled to wear, complicated layers which concealed individuality and styled, as evident in the required headdress, on the traditional clothing worn by medieval nuns.  Even the names by which she would be known in the world of English nursing would emphasize her status as a professional at the same time that they masked her individuality and minimized her identity as a woman.  Within the hospital, she would be known by her surname alone or as ‘Nurse Challans’; on the wards, doctors, nurses, and patients would call her merely ‘Sister’.  By becoming a nurse, Renault was dedicating her life to serving others and would follow a rigid regime of long hours on duty in extremely hierarchical institutions.  She was expected to live in a cell-like room within the hospital or school, to be available on the wards or in the surgical theatre during any emergency, and to maintain the decorum and celibacy her vocation implied.

Nurse Challans, however, was engaging in two activities her superiors did not imagine: She was finally writing a novel, based autobiographically on her hospital experiences, and she was falling passionately in love for the first time--with another female student.  When Renault finished her novel in the late thirties, it seemed practical, even essential for her future as a nurse, to hide her identity under another surname.  It was likely a romantic impulse rather than any carefully-thought-out or complex symbolism that lead her to choose the name of a character in a Renaissance play, although in retrospect it’s tempting to conclude that she also wanted to claim for herself an identity so different from what her time and nation expected of her that she might even appear to be French.  Later Renault would go further and refuse to stabilize even the pronunciation of her pen name: was it ‘Renault’ in the continental manner (like, for instance, the car) or ‘Ren-alt’, as most English people would naturally say it?  She left the pronunciation entirely up to her readers, as if to declare that what she had written, both in her books and on their title pages, would need to stand on its own, would need to represent her, would need to stand for her, in all its ambiguity.

Q. What should feminists and members of the LGBTQ community take away from Mary’s story? 

It may be tempting today to criticize Renault for not being sufficiently radical.  Such criticism seems to me grossly unfair for several reasons.  Most obviously, it stems from a failure to understand the historical context which shaped Renault as a young woman coming to maturity in pre-war England and which influenced her reading public at least into the 1970s.  Such criticism also ignores Renault's rejection of any collective identity—for example, as a lesbian, but also as a woman, as a white South African, and as a progressive or a conservative within the culture of the Britain of her youth or the South Africa of her maturity—a rejection that can be understood not so much as naive and conventional but as sophisticated and even radical from a queer perspective that argues that ‘identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression.’  

Obversely, one might be tempted to pardon Renault for her bisexual position, treating her as either naïve or ignorant, caught inextricably in her own time and place, deprived of the knowledge and insights available to us as a result of recent lesbian and feminist research and theory.  Such patronizing would be, I feel, as unfair as it is unsubstantiated by the evidence not only of Renault’s writing but of her own life.  In her afterward, written at the end of her life, to the Virago edition of The Friendly Young Ladies, Renault was in fact pushed to defend her position.  I think we must take her at her word when she wrote, ‘I have sometimes been asked whether I would have written this book more explicitly in a more permissive decade.  No; I have always been as explicit as I wanted to be.’  Addressing the same question more specifically in a letter to me in 1996, Julie (Renault’s partner) would declare that the matter of sexual orientation and identity was both more complicated and simpler than any explicit or popular label.  Despite what their union may have looked like to others, despite what it ‘approximated’ in living arrangements, commitment and depth of feeling, there was nothing formal about their bond to each other.  Julie even went so far as to declare, ‘we hadn’t planned to remain friends or whatever we call ourselves.’  Both Renault and Julie would have scoffed at the idea that their partnership was in any traditional sense a ‘marriage’, although what it was remained unnamed, even unnameable.  Years later, however, they agreed that they never would have left each other.  In Julie’s words, it ‘just seemed we liked each other best.’ 

Q. What do you think artists today would think of Mary’s belief that “art should be not without political implications, but above and beyond politics” (193).

Feminists now recognize that the personal is political. All of Renault’s work is political in this deeper and larger sense.  She was in no way writing tracts for or against any particular political candidate or party platform or specific law, but she would have contended that her work always engaged with ethical issues.  Insomuch as ethical issues are or ought to be at the core of how people govern themselves and of what people expect from themselves and their society, Renault’s work is always engaged, always political… whether or not she was comfortable using the term. 

Q. Are you currently working on any new books or projects?

I recently published my own historical novel, Transgressions, about two writers, the English poet Richard Aldington and the bisexual American poet Hilda Doolittle, whose passion was challenged by the forces of war and their own bohemian views of art and marriage. With their circle of friends who included Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, Richard and Hilda rebelled against convention both in their art and in their personal lives.

I am now working on another biography: a life of my father, the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, from his birth as a Jew in Czarist Russia in 1890 through his death in New York City in 1959.  He served as secretary to the Minister of Labor in Kerensky’s revolutionary government and as a doctor at the front during World War I before escaping to America in 1919.  After analysis in Berlin in the late 1920s, he became a prominent psychoanalyst and his patients included wealthy and artistic figures, among them Marshall Field III, George Gershwin, Kay Swift, Moss Hart, Lillian Hellman and Thomas Merton as well as members of the Warburg and de Menil Families. He joined the Quakers in 1922, but turned increasingly towards more traditional Christianity and finally converted to Catholicism in 1954.  He wrote extensively and his works include a history of psychiatry, for which he is still known, while arguing in his later work that there was no incompatibility between psychoanalysis and religion.

Author Spotlight: Donald Spivey

“If You Were Only White”: The Life of Leroy“Satchel” Paige by Donald Spivey

“If You Were Only White” explores the legacy of one of the most exceptional athletes ever—an entertainer extraordinaire, a daring showman and crowd-pleaser, a wizard with a baseball whose artistry and antics on the mound brought fans out in the thousands to ballparks across the country. Leroy “Satchel” Paige was arguably one of the world’s greatest pitchers and a premier star of Negro Leagues Baseball. But in this biography Donald Spivey reveals Paige to have been much more than just a blazing fastball pitcher.

Q: Satchel Paige is a name we’re perhaps less familiar with than we should be, in spite of his monumental achievements both on and off the field. What compelled you to tell his story?

I knew of Satchel Paige as a sports fan and historian of sports and the African American experience.  I had been saying since the early 1980s how much we needed a biography of him written by a professional historian.  There had been a number of journalistic treatments of the pitching sensation, but nothing applying rigorous scholarship to bring to life the full story of the one and only Mr. Paige.  It was at one of the historical conferences that the venerable historian John Hope Franklin heard and noted my remarks.  Sometime later, when he was approached by the University of Missouri Press for the name of a scholar to do a biography of Satchel Paige, he gave them my name.  Be careful what you wish for, it may come true!  I accepted the offer and signed a contract with the press to produce the biography.  My thinking was that the project would not take that long, a maximum of three years.  How wrong I was.  Twelve years later, the biography was finally finished.  I am proud to have produced the first scholarly biography of Leroy “Satchel” Paige, and one that from the outset was dedicated to being readable and accessible to the public.

Q: People tend to think of Jackie Robinson as the person who integrated baseball. Why is Satchel Paige less known than Robinson?

Jackie Robinson, of course, received the glare of media attention when he became the first African American in the modern era to play Major League Baseball.  Satchel Paige is critical because he paved the way for Robinson and the integration of the Majors.  You would have been hard-pressed in the 1930s and 40s and well into the 1950s if not later to find anyone who claimed a love of baseball who was not familiar with the name of Satchel Paige, black or white.  In his era, he was the most beloved African American in baseball and the greatest star of all in the Negro Leagues.  All of us today should know his name and celebrate his arrival in the Majors when he signed with the Cleveland Indians in 1948 at the ripe young age of forty-two.

Q: It was Satchel’s ability not only as an athlete but also as an entertainer that bolstered his star and made him a household name. Was Satchel’s Vaudeville-inspired act degrading by definition, or do you feel it is more aptly described as subversive or tongue-in-cheek?

Satchel Paige saw no contradiction in playing a great game of baseball and entertaining the fans at the same time.  Indeed, he like the rest of the ballplayers in the Negro Leagues understood that sport was a business, an entertainment business that required breathing life into the game and how you played it. Paige did stunts, to be sure, entertaining fans with fancy ball handling, behind-the-back throws, shadow ball, daring pitching, and humor on and off the field.  He kept you glued to his performance with his antics.  The press adored him.  He was a master pitcher and master entertainer.  When you think of Bill Veeck, the most innovative of the Major League team owners, you have to associate his name with the individual he always named as his favorite player, Satchel Paige.  They did a lot of stunting together, and this brought fans out in record numbers.  We can look back at Paige through present-day eyes and question some of his antics, but fans back then, both white and black, loved every moment of it.

Q: “If You Were Only White” draws attention to the impact Satchel Paige’s career had on baseball as well as the Civil Rights movement. What were Paige’s most significant contributions as an athlete and as a proponent for social justice?

I could list for you specific things that Paige did in support of the cause of civil rights such as contributing to the defense fund of the Scottsboro Boys, supporting the call for anti-lynching legislation, and pushing Major League Baseball, once he got in, to bring other blacks into the fold.  But I think, without a doubt, that Paige’s greatest contribution to the struggle for civil rights came from his personal protest demonstrations.  He did it from the pitcher’s mound.  Every time he stepped out there and took on the best of white Major League players while barnstorming and then finally in the Majors, he was making a statement about the absurdity of the color line with his brilliant performances on the mound.  

Q: What impact do you think Satchel Paige’s persona has had on modern celebrity?

Paige was a role model.  He was one of the first bona-fide superstar black athletes outside of boxing.  Only Joe Louis rivaled him in terms of fan adulation.  He well understood every time he stepped out on the mound that he represented a race and that he was making a statement for fairness and equal opportunity.  He literally struck out Jim Crow.  This book is an effort to put him where he belongs: center stage in the African American struggle for equality and justice.

Q:  What kind of correctives to the legend of Satchel Paige do you offer the knowledgeable Paige fan?

Twelve years was spent on this project to separate reality from myth in the legendary career of Satchel Paige.  Who really did teach Satchel Paige to pitch?  That is answered definitively in this book, and it was not the person all previous studies claimed.  Another important question is what happened to Paige when he was in reform school, and why were those years so critical in his transformation?  I can answer all that for you right here, but would rather have you get your copy of the book for the answers to those questions and many more. 

Q: Do you have any upcoming books or projects readers can anticipate?

Readers can look forward to my forthcoming anthology, Black Pearls of Wisdom: Voicing the African-American Journey for Freedom, Empowerment, and the Future, which will be out in December.  Also, I’m working on a biography of Milton L. Olive, III, the first African American awarded the Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War.  

Get Schooled on Missouri Heritage

I wrinkle my nose as I step outside. School's coming. I can smell it in the air. Pencil shavings, school buses, sack lunches — all of that. Depending on your perspective, it's a wonderful potpourri or a dreadful miasma. What that smell signals to me, though, is the end of leisurely reading.

I begin every summer the same: I vow to read constantly and just plow through everything on my shelf. But then my life always gets in the way somehow. As the dog days of summer wind down, I realize that this year has been no different for me. Soon, the slow but steady onslaught of assignments from all of my classes will overwhelm me, and I'll no longer have time to dip into, say, that Faulkner book I was finally getting around to.

But don't lose hope. The end of summer is nigh, but there's still just enough time to fit in a book or two before the school year really starts. Why not take a look at the Press's Missouri Heritage Reader series? For the whole month of August, all the books in that collection are 30% off. Yo, that's a lot of history. Just visit our Special Offers page and enter the promotional code MHR13 when checking out to receive this special discount. The offer ends September 1, 2013.

Pick up mo' books about MO.

Paris, Tightwad, Peculiar, Neosho, Gasconade, Hannibal, Diamond, Quarantine, Zif, Zig -- these are just a few of the names Margot Ford McMillen covers in Paris, Tightwad, and Peculiar, her lively book on the history of place names in Missouri. The origins behind the names range from humorous to descriptive. For example, Tightwad, Missouri, is said to have been named after a store owner who cheated a mailman out of his rightful watermelon to make an extra fifty cents.

While there are many accessible biographies of important Missouri men, there are few such biographies of Missouri women, which might suggest that they did not count in history. Called to Courage, written by a mother-and-daughter team, helps to correct that misconception by tracing the lives of four women who played important roles in their eras. These women were exceptional because they had the courage to make the best of their abilities, forging trails and breaking the barriers that separated women’s spheres from those of men.

In The Missouri State Penitentiary, Jamie Pamela Rasmussen recounts the long and fascinating history of the place, focusing on the stories of inmates and the struggles by prison officials to provide opportunities for reform while keeping costs down. Tales of prominent prisoners, including Pretty Boy Floyd, Sonny Liston, and James Earl Ray, provide intrigue and insight into the institution's infamous reputation.

Stories from the Heart is a collection of family stories and traditional tales about all walks of African American life. Passed down from grandparents and great-grandparents, they have been lovingly gathered by Gladys Caines Coggswell as she visited Missouri communities and participated in storytelling events over the last two decades. These stories bring to life characters with uncommon courage, strength, will, and wit as they offer insight into African American experiences throughout the state's history. 

 The Missouria people were the first American Indians encountered by European explorers venturing up the Pekitanoui River—the waterway we know as the Missouri. This Indian nation called itself the Nyut^achi, which translates to “People of the River Mouth,” and had been a dominant force in the Louisiana Territory of the pre-colonial era. When first described by the Europeans in 1673, they numbered in the thousands. But by 1804, when William Clark referred to them as “once the most powerful nation on the Missouri River,” fewer than 400 Missouria remained. The state and Missouri River are namesakes of these historic Indians, but little of the tribe’s history is known today. Michael Dickey tells the story of these indigenous Americans in The People of the River’s Mouth.

The one-room schoolhouse may be a thing of the past, but it is the foundation on which modern education rests. Sue Thomas now traces the progress of early education in Missouri, demonstrating how important early schools were in taming the frontier.  A Second Home offers an in-depth and entertaining look at education in the days when pioneers had to postpone schooling for their children until they could provide shelter for their families and clear their fields for crops, while well-to-do families employed tutors or sent their children back east.

 

For descriptions of all the books in the series--all on sale during the month of August--visit the Special Offers page today!