Elinor Wylie’s body of work—four novels and four volumes of poetry produced between 1921 and 1928—has often been overshadowed by her controversial personal life. In A Private Madness Evelyn Hively explores the points at which her life and her art intersect and demonstrates how Wylie “used language and literary form to transform the chaos of her experiences.” This purpose was successfully met, as A Private Madness presents Wylie and her work within the culture of the twenties.

Author William H. Hildebrand takes readers on an exhilarating and illuminating ride through Kent State University’s ten decades: from its beginning under its visionary founder John Edward McGilvrey to the hardships of the Great Depression; through the post–World War II boom years and the tumultuous sixties culminating in the May 4, 1970, tragedy; from the university’s struggle to regain its bearings during the decade-long aftermath, to its restoration and academic resurgence in the eighties and nineties; and into the emerging opportunities and challenges of the new millennium.

Collaborative Form attempts to show the nature and limits of works of art that are made up of two or more artistic forms. The first task of this book is to analyze and interpret a set of such combinations. Each chapter treats one collaborative work and attempts to show that the principles of collaboration are the same, whether the components are poetry and graphic works as in Lettera Amorosa by Rene Char and George Braque, poetry and music as in Herzgewachse by Maurice Maeterlinck and Arnold Schoenberg, or more complex sets that include painting, music, dance, lighting, and drama as in Der gelbe Klang by Wassily Kandinsky, Morder, Hoffnung der frauen by Oskar Kokoschka, and Triad by Alwin Nikolais.

“In 1941, Frank Kessler, a young accountant in Canton, Ohio, was drafted, assigned to an Army Signal Corps unit, and went away to photograph the war in Europe. In 1945, home again with his wife and children, he stored hundreds of those images of blood and battle in his attic. There they stayed until after his death…”

This new collection finds photographer James Jeffery Higgins exploring the fading farms and small towns of the Ohio Valley. Higgins’s photographs capture the beauty and majesty of the landscape and the spirit of the people who remain in a region beset by economic losses. While recording the ever-present signs of hard times, he also captures a powerful sense of place, a victory of the spirit.

Over the last 150 years, steel production played a vital role in the shaping of our nation. This was especially true in Youngstown, Ohio, a part of what is now often referred to as “the Rust Belt.” In their prime, however, the Youngstown mills ran along 25 miles of the Mahoning River and employed tens of thousands of people. All of that changed in September 1977 when the LTV Corporation announced that it was closing its Youngstown Works. Youngstown today struggles for its survival.

For all the serious scholarship and popular writing devoted to the American Civil War, the topic of prisoner-of-war camps, more than any other, retains the feeling of horror and passion that characterized the war years themselves, “Men held captive under such circumstances, guilty of no offense other than the deplorable misfortune of having been captured by the enemy, suffer tremendous psychological punishment as well as physical hardship. Monotony, estrangement and fear, along with privation and often brutality, combine to create nearly as wretched a quality of human life as is imaginable. The sufferings of Civil War prisoners (are) documented in this re-issue of an early number of the journal Civil War History ….Recounted there….are prisoner experiences in four Confederate installations: Andersonville, Georgia; Libby in Richmond, Virginia; Cahaba, Alabama; and Charleston, South Carolina. The remaining articles treat conditions in four Union prisons: Fort Warren in Boston harbor; Rock Island, Illinois; Elmira, New York; and Johnson’s Island on Lake Erie….in addition to some examples of sparkling and vivid prose, this volume contains a number of excellent photographs as well as an introduction by the late William B. Hesseltine….”—-Kenneth B. Shover, The Historian

After decades of controversy surrounding the May 4 commemoration, the University moved in a new direction, choosing to use the 30th anniversary as an opportunity to recognize the past and embrace the future. A major component of this was the establishment of an annual scholarly symposium to focus on the great issues of American democracy. The Boundaries of Freedom of Expression and Order in American Democracy is the product of the first symposium, which explored the limits of freedom of expression in American society as they apply to business, education, media, law, politics, the Internet, and other venues.

Under Kilimanjaro is the last of Hemingway’s manuscripts to be published in its entirety. Editors Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming believe that “this book deserves as complete and faithful a publication as possible without editorial distortion, speculation, or textually unsupported attempts at improvement. Our intent has been to produce a complete reading text of Ernest Hemingway’s manuscript. . . .Working on it was both a privilege and a responsibility. . . .Readers of this remarkable work will experience the mingled pleasure of revisiting the familiar and discovering the new.”

The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time examines alternate history science fiction using the eschatological, genetic, entropic, and teleological historical models. Hellekson’s original approach explains much of the appeal of alternate history and distinguishes among the many varieties of the genre. In her measured consideration of a range of writers, Hellekson displays a deep and broad knowledge of the major works in this genre—those by famous or neglected writers alike.