Books published by University Press of Mississippi

For over forty years, Clarence Major has engaged several artistic and literary pursuits, garnering acclaim for his paintings, edited anthologies, poetry collections, essays, and novels. In this collection he comments thoughtfully on the diverse nature of his work, exploring his influences, his writing methods, and his childhood.

Recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Elisha Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.

The interviews in this volume span the period from 1970 to 1993. In them N. Scott Momaday responds candidly to questions relating to his multicultural background, his views on the place of the Indian in American literature and society, his concern for conservation, his theory of language, and comments on specific works he has written.

Interviews with the author of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Flowering Judas, and The Leaning Tower.

For the lay reader wishing to know more about this disease that has become more prominent in public attention, Understanding Colon Cancer gives concise information and explanation. It covers fundamental knowledge about occurrence, carcinogenesis, genetics, diagnosis, staging, prognosis, and treatment.

For a biographer Shelby Foote is a famously reluctant subject. In writing this biography, however, C. Stuart Chapman gained valuable access through interviews and shared correspondence, an advantage Foote rarely has granted to others.

Brings together a dozen essays devoted to aspects of Moliere's stagecraft, each of which illustrates in its way Hall's thesis of comedy in context. This volume of essays complements other studies of the comedies by focusing attention on an even larger audience upon the plays as Hall believes the playwright conceived them.

This is a marvelously interesting collection of letters written over a period of thirty years by members of the Thomas A. Watkins family of Carroll County, Mississippi. The correspondence provides an intimate look into activities in the household of Forest Place during a period of great propserity and a period of decline.

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) gained national attention upon release of The Business of Fancydancing, his first collection of poems, in 1992. In Conversations with Sherman Alexie, the writer displays the same passion, dynamic sense of humour, and sharp observational skills that characterize his work.

This book begins with a simple question: Why haven't historians and musicologists been talking to one another? This collection of original essays, the first of its kind, argues that the conversation between scholars in the two fields can become richer and more mutually informing.

History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. Can Anything Beat White? contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge both representations of black people at the turn of the century as well as our contemporary sense of black Americans.

This is a remarkable collection of letters covering nearly four decades of correspondence between two of the South's foremost literary figures. The correspondence between Tate and Lytle documents the evolution of a long personal and literary relationship between two men who helped shape a large part of modern southern literature.

Brings attention to a little known period in the career of America's most notable humorist. It follows the writer-performer Down Under on a journey through thirty lectures in colonial Australia and New Zealand. This appealing book is a daily account of Twain's activities and is based upon his notebooks his letters, and newspaper reports that appeared both in cities and in the provinces.

To the end of his life Richard Wright attempted to discover and to express the force between black artistic creation. This fascination with this distinctive Afro-American perception is the key to understanding Wright's aesthetic principle. Voice of a Native Son explores this poetic principle in both published and unpublished works of Wright.

One of the most difficult if not least productive exercises undertaken in Mississippi in the last half-century has been the recurring effort to reorganise the executive branch of state government. In reviewing those efforts, Thomas Kynerd attempts to gain insight into the repeated failures.

Soon after Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) published his first novel, Lucky Jim, in 1954, he became an object of literary and journalistic scrutiny. This attention would continue until his last days, four decades and forty books later. Conversations with Kingsley Amis includes both the first and last interviews Amis gave.

Tells the story of Bill Moore, a white mail carrier, and his freedom walk from Chattanooga to Jackson to hand-deliver a plea for racial tolerance to Ross Barnett, the staunchly segregationist governor of Mississippi. Moore kept a journal that detailed his goal. Using it, along with interviews and extensive newspaper and newsreel reports, Mary Stanton documents this phenomenal freedom walk.

For much of the early 1990s, Haiti held the world's attention. A fiery populist priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was elected president and deposed a year later in a military coup. These extraordinary events provide the backdrop for Plunging into Haiti, Ralph Pezzullo's detailed account of the international diplomatic effort to resolve the political crisis.

The largest offensive of the Civil War, involving army, navy, and marine forces, the Peninsula Campaign has inspired many history books. No previous work, however, analyses Union general George B. McClellan's massive assault toward Richmond in the context of current and enduring military doctrine. The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: A Military Analysis fills this void.

Walt Kelly (1913-1973) is one of the most respected and innovative American cartoonists of the twentieth century. His long-running Pogo newspaper strip has been cited by modern comics artists and scholars as one of the best ever. We Go Pogo is the first comprehensive study of Kelly's cartoon art and his larger career in the comics business.

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the indisputably great writers of the twentieth century, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. Conducted between 1964 and 1984, the interviews collected in this volume reveal Borges to be a remarkably candid, humorous man, by turns skeptical and enthusiastic, and always a singularly incisive and adventurous thinker.

Interviews with the author of Baby, It's Cold Outside, Chicken Inspector #23, and Crazy like a Fox

Traces the roots of evangelical Christianity in Mississippi and shows how the evangelicals became a force of cultural revolution. As Sparks explores the dissonance between the state's powerful evangelical voice and Mississippi's social and cultural mores, he reveals the striking irony of faith and society in conflict.