Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians (Da Capo Press), by Justin Martin
Walt Whitman had just revolutionized poetry before finding his way to a Manhattan tavern called Pfaff’s. With its elliptical free verse, the recently published Leaves of Grass was unlike any previous collection of poems, but as Justin Martin reminds us, few copies of the early editions sold. Martin focuses on how Whitman was influenced by Pfaff’s, a free-spirited gathering place for the bohemians who became America’s first counterculture. Whitman found a supportive social milieu and a critical audience. Rebel Souls is also devoted to Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Henry Clapp Jr. and other less remembered (but interesting) Pfaff’s regulars.
Ray Bradbury Unbound (University of Illinois Press), by Jonathan R. Eller
In his new biography, Jonathan R. Eller picks up where he left off with Becoming Ray Bradbury. Unbound covers the author from 1953 through his death in 2012. The Indiana University-Purdue English professor is sympathetic to his subject. Unlike some academics in his field, he is favorable toward the Romantic impulses that drove Bradbury, a writer who played in an emotional, not a cerebral, key. Eller’s thesis is that Bradbury’s gifts as storyteller suffered after 1953 when he turned his focus to screenplays, theater and other media. He makes his case well. Most of Bradbury’s “new” stories after ’53 were previously unpublished or reworked manuscripts from his red-hot decade of creativity, the 1940s.
Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature (W.W. Norton), by Robert Darnton
Harvard University’s Robert Darnton explores censorship in three nations, the choices determined by the author’s knowledge of languages as well as ease of access. He finds that government censorship has taken many forms. In 17th-century France, enthusiastic reports by censors were often appended to the books like dust jacket blurbs nowadays; in France, censors acted as editors, improving style and fact checking as well as weeding out illicit ideas. Civil servants in British India catalogued and described every publication, even ones deemed potentially dangerous; only with the rise of Hindu terrorist groups did the Brits crack down in sedition trials whose verdicts hung on hermeneutics and linguistics. Communist East Germany produced yearly publishing plans according to the dictates of social realism; its censors vigorously debated manuscripts at the margins of Communist correctness. A strange picture emerges of censors as intelligent men and women, subject to influence peddling and often advocating work they admired against the frowning responses of higher ups. They often behaved like editors in an American publishing house, except the penalty for rejection could be prison.
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Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas (W.W. Norton), by Adam Kirsch
One of Adam Kirsch’s gifts is bringing to life writers most of us have never heard of, much less read. A critic for the New Republic and The New Yorker, Kirsch has an engaging way of getting at the heart of questions, even if answers can remain elusive. When he addresses familiar writers, whether Hannah Arendt or David Foster Wallace, he stimulates thought and eschews clichés. One of his accomplishments is to critique pseudo-Darwinian theories of art, stripping the clothes and exposing the wobbly knees of an idea that has no business migrating from its home in biology to the humanities.
Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Neil L. Rudenstine
Shakespeare’s sonnets have been dissected, deconstructed and interpreted from every possible angle. In Ideas of Order, Harvard University’s Neil Rudenstine develops the idea that sequence is everything: The seeming contradictions of the sonnets are explicable if read as a story with a dramatic arc. The poet-narrator’s love for a younger man is threatened by infidelities before both are drawn into the erotic orbit of the “dark lady.” Rudenstine presents a plausible explanation for the “many—often sudden—shifts in style and point of view, particularly in the wake of unexpected events.”