Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Edward Albee's numerous roles and achievements are reflected in the lively interviews in this collection. These reveal the many sides and responses of one of the most significant dramatists of our age.

A long overdue anthology of interviews with Canada's most respected literary figure. Journalist, essayist, reviewer, playwright, and novelist, Robertson Davies has not only been a leading figure in Canadian literature since World War II, but, since the publication of Fifth Business in 1970, he has become known throughout the world.

Deconstructs Afrocentric essentialism by illuminating and interrogating the problematic situation of Africa as the foundation of a racialized worldwide African Diaspora. Tunde Adeleke attempts to fill an intellectual gap by analysing the contradictions in Afrocentric representations of the continent.

In this collection of essays, contributors ask how overlooked literature in the 1950s addressed or anticipated the struggles of disenfranchised groups to receive rights and recognition. Scholars analyse the many ways in which the decade's culture stigmatized women, minorities, and the poor, and they uncover work that illustrates how groups and individuals challenged or resisted that oppression.

As a novelist who has spent years crafting and refining his intense and oftoutrageous "Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction" persona, James Ellroyhas used interviews as a means of shaping narratives outside of his novels.Conversations with James Ellroy covers a series of interviews given by Ellroyfrom 1984 to 2010, in which Ellroy discusses his literary contribution andhis public and private image.Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most criticallyacclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historicalfiction. Ellroy's complex narratives, which merge history and fiction,have pushed the boundaries of the crime fiction genre: American Tabloid, arevisionist look at the Kennedy era, was Time magazine's Novel of the Year1995, and his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were adaptedinto films. Much of Ellroy's remarkable life story has served as the templatefor the personal obsessions that dominate his writing. From the brutal,unsolved murder of his mother, to his descent into alcohol and drug abuse,his sexual voyeurism, and his stints at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ellroyhas lived through a series of hellish experiences that few other writerscould claim.Steven Powell is an independent scholar and the co-founder and co-editorof the crime fiction studies website The Venetian Vase. He is the editor ofthe forthcoming 100 American Crime Writers.

Always daring Hollywood censors' limits on content, Billy Wilder directed greats such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, and Gary Cooper. These collected interviews follow the filmmaking career of one of Hollywood's most honoured and successful writer-directors and spans over fifty years.

The lively interviews in this collection reveal Derek Walcott's generous and brilliant intelligence as well as his strong, forthright opinions. He discusses the craft of poetry, the status of contemporary poetry and drama, his founding of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and his views on a number of influential writers.

Brings together almost all of the known interviews Elizabeth Bishop gave over a period of thirty years. Included also are a few selected pieces based on conversations with her. All together they allow her ardent and admiring readers a rewarding, close-up encounter with one of America's great writers.

Includes twenty-six conversations with Lillian Hellman, ranging from early newspaper interviews on the occasions of the Broadway openings of her plays through extended talks with her which appears in the Paris Review, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, down to her last interviews in the early 1980s.

Out of this collection of twenty-two interviews spanning two decades rises the distinctive voice of "the princess of black poetry". Nikki Giovanni entered the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement and quickly achieved not simple fame but stardom, a phenomenon almost unprecedented for a poet.

Roger Corman (b. 1926) is known by many names-- craftsman, artist, maverick, schlock-meister, mini-mogul, mentor, cheapskate, and King of the B's. Yet his commitment to filmmaking remains inspired. He learned his craft at the end of the studio system, only to rebel against Hollywood and define himself as the true independent. And the list of directors and producers who learned under his tutelage--Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, and many more--is astonishing.Collected here are many of the most honest and revealing interviews of his epic career, several of which have never been seen in print. Roger Corman: Interviews brings into focus a life committed to the entertaining art of motion pictures.Corman's rare talent combined artistic drive with business savvy, ensuring a successful career that was constantly in motion. At a remarkable pace more akin to silent movies than modern Hollywood, he directed over fifty films in less than fifteen years, some entertaining (Not of This Earth), trendsetting (The Wild Angels), daring (The Intruder), workmanlike (Apache Woman), stylized (The Masque of the Red Death) and even profound (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes). In a single year, Corman famously shot a cult classic in two and a half days (The Little Shop of Horrors), reinvigorated the American horror film with a dash of Poe and Price (House of Usher)--and still turned out a few more films shot across the globe. Recently awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime contribution to cinema, the self-made Corman has created a legacy as a defining filmmaker.Constantine Nasr, Van Nuys, California, is a filmmaker and DVD producer, whose documentaries include Warner at War; Public Enemies: The Golden Age of the Gangster Film; and 1939: Hollywood's Greatest Year. He has published in Video Watchdog, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and Little Shoppe of Horrors.

With wit, charm, and grace the interviews in this collection demonstrate what readers of Wilbur's poems long have suspected: that this former US poet laureate is no less persuasive and forceful in extemporaneous speech than he is in verse and prose.

How midcentury periodicals that fostered an indelible middle-class ideal for American women also confronted the happy homemaker stereotypeRead by millions of women each month, such mainstream periodicals as Ladies'' Home Journal and McCall''s delivered powerful messages about women''s roles and behavior. In 1963 Betty Friedan''s The Feminine Mystique accused the genre of helping to create what Friedan termed "the problem that has no name" -- that is, presenting women as stereotypical happy homemakers with limited interests and abilities.But this ideal of contented, domestic women was far from monolithic in the periodical literature of the time. Nancy A. Walker''s analysis of a wide range of magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and others, reveals their depiction of a broader, fuller image of womanhood. As she notes a reflection of complex debates about the nature of domestic life in the 1940s and 1950s, she perceives editorial policies that mixed the banalities with urgent actualities. Rather than making isolated decisions about content, editors interacted with advertising agencies, with manufacturers of products, with experts in such fields as nutrition, medicine, technology, and childcare, and with the preferences and values of their readers.When World War II altered family patterns by taking millions into the armed services and drawing many women to jobs in defense plants, magazine articles both supported and attacked the new roles women took, while applauding women''s home-front contributions to the war effort. After the war the magazines reflected Cold War anxieties while touting the rising consumer culture. Even as magazine ads promoted a white, suburban, middle-class ideal, such series as "How America Lives" in Ladies'' Home Journal revealed a society that was economically and ethnically diverse.The pages of women''s magazines of the 1940s and 1950s helped to shape and expand the domestic world our mothers inhabited. Examining the articles, fiction, advice columns, and advertisements that the magazines comprised during midcentury, Walker argues persuasively that the contradictory messages were a reflection of complex cultural values and institutions at a time when the domestic world became increasingly important as both a symbol of American democracy and the site of personal fulfillment.

Tells the story of America's program of jazz diplomacy practiced in the Soviet Union and other regions of the world from 1954 to 1968. Jazz Diplomacy argues that this musical method of winning hearts and minds often transcended economic and strategic priorities.

Studies of the Irish presence in America have tended to look to the main corridors of emigration, and hence outside the American South. Yet the Irish constituted a significant minority in the region. Rethinking the Irish in the South aims to create a readable, thorough introduction to the subject, establishing new ground for areas of inquiry.

Perhaps no pattern of migration has changed America's socioeconomic structure more than the mass exodus from south to north of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. In Black Exodus eight scholars consider the causes that stimulated the migration and examine the far-reaching results.

Offers a focused and perceptive analysis of a phenomenon in our popular culture - the new respectability of the comic book form - and argues that the comics medium has a productive tradition of telling true stories with grace and economy.

Truman Capote once said, "The thing I like to do most in the whole world is talk...", and talk he does in the more than two dozen interviews collected in this book. The topics are often gossip about the famous people Capote ran with, but always he provides revealing information about his writings.

As they race to and from emergency calls, as they wait and watch, and as they administer aid, paramedics tell stories. Their tales disclose much about how they view their profession. Their duties are much more complex than the dramatic portrayals that reach us via the television screen. This book reports what really goes on behind the scenes.

A collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic.

Intense, controversial, unfailingly clever, V. S. Naipaul has won nearly every major British writing award. This collection brings together interviews from a thirty-six-year span and reveals a witty, sometimes scathing talker with a free-ranging curiosity, but one who dreads intimacy and cherishes a solitary detachment.

Contains thirty-two interviews with this major writer, who during his long career enjoyed both the celebrity and the controversy that his books generated. These collected interviews include what is apparently his first, given in 1929 before the publication of The Bastard, to one of the very last, given just before his death in April 1987.

A thematic tour of the complete works from this exceptional southern writer

This informative study helps to complete the saga of the Choctaw by documenting the life and culture of those who escaped removal. It is an account that until now has been left largely untold.

This collection of seventeen interviews covers fifty years. In all the interviews Graham Greene granted over the years, the reader hears very clearly the voice of a man whose conversation is as painfully honest and unpretentious as is his written prose.

Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, but set it in a time and place favoured by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand: Free Man of Color examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans.

This first book to make a detailed exploration of the system of riverboat traffic of the Delta region, Steamboats and the Cotton Economy is also the first balanced study showing how steamboats in the early years of the republic performed essentially the same role that railroads would later perform in revolutionizing the interior of America.

This collection of thirty years of interviews with America's only Nobel Prize dramatist records his encounters with the press and gives a striking portrait of the man and the process of his public mythologizing.

In 1862, in one of the South's most amazing secret operations, a Confederate team, using newly invented explosive mines, blew up the USS Cairo, one of the Union's most feared ironclad gunboats. Here, for the first time, in a carefully documented study is the entire story of the Confederate Secret Service team that sank the USS Cairo.