Cairns Collection of American Women Writers

"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

Polly's friendship with the wealthy Shaws of Boston helps them to build a new life and teachers her the truth about the relationship between happiness and riches.

To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier mythology...

Includes mention of her trip to Charleston in 1838.

Excerpt: "There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. Such a phrase-employed with tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping into the pages of what is, by courtesy, called literature-is the "new woman." It has furnished inexhaustible jests to "Life" and "Punch," and it has been received with seriousness...

Although Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems, only a handful were ever published in her lifetime, and those anonymously. Today, she is recognized as one of the most important American poets of the nineteenth century, one whose unconventional use of language and rhyme anticipated the break with tradition of much modern poetry written after it. The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson collects more than 150 of Dickinsons brief but memorable poems....

Jewett again showcases her uncanny ability to capture the day-to-day life of regular New England folk in this engaging collection of stories published in 1890. Included among the selections is the evocative tale "A White Heron," the poignant sketch, "Marsh Rosemary," and "The Dulham Ladies," an enduring portrait filled with delicate humor.

Flame and Shadow (1920) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet's fifth collection, published two years after she won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, death, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Flame and Shadow revels in the mystery of existence itself. "What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring, / That my songs do not show...