Born in 1911 to an unconventional, free-spirited artist mother and an eminent paleontologist father, Margaret Matthew chose a career as an artist specializing in restorations of extinct animals. She began her career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City drawing fossil bones, and there she met her husband, the noted paleontologist Edwin (Ned) Colbert. Charming the Bones portrays Margaret’s life as the wife of a famous man and the mother of five sons and, later in her life, as a respected restoration artist, illustrator, and sculptor.

Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction is the first comprehensive textual, bibliographical, and cultural study of sixty years of Bradbury’s fiction. Drawing on correspondence with his publishers, agents, and friends, as well as archival manuscripts, The Life of Fiction examines the story of Bradbury’s authorship over more than a half-century, from his earliest writings, which include The Martian Chronicles, to his most recently published novel, Let’s All Kill Constance. It shows in detail the often devious and unsuspected interconnections between his unpublished fiction, his story collections, and his most celebrated novels.

Cleveland’s Harbor chronicles the challenges, struggles, and politics of establishing and maintaining this major port—from General Cleaveland to Mayor Michael White. Among those whose dedication and ingenuity fostered the port were Lorenzo Carter, who cultivated the first settlement; Levi Johnson and the Turhooven brothers, builders of The Enterprise—Cleveland’s first commercial vessel; Alfred Kelley, Governor Ethan Allen Brown, and Micajah Williams, who were instrumental in getting the canal built connecting Lake Erie to the Ohio River; John Malvin, a freedman, who became the first black vessel owner, a captain, and minister for the First Baptist Congregation; Eli Peck, designer of the forerunner of the classic ore boat; Alexander McDougall, who fashioned the innovative shaleback hull; and George Hulett, who, with the support of Andrew Carnegie and Charles Schwab, revolutionized harbor operations with his invention of the unloader.

Cannibal Old Me is an excellent contribution to Melville scholarship, challenging long-held assumptions regarding his early works. Scholars as well as students will welcome it as an indispensable addition to the study of nineteenth-century literature and maritime history.

Using these overlooked and sensational magazines, David M. Earle explores the popular image of Ernest Hemingway in order to consider the dynamics of both literary celebrity and midcentury masculinity. Profusely illustrated with magazine covers, article blurbs, and advertisements in full color, All Man! considers the role that visuality played in the construction of Hemingway’s reputation, as well as conveys a lurid and largely overlooked genre of popular publishing. More than just a contribution to Hemingway studies, All Man! is an important addition to scholarship in the modernist era in American literature, gender studies, popular culture, and the history of publishing.

A New Book of the Grotesques (the title is adapted from the first tale in Winesburg, Ohio) does not challenge previous studies of Anderson as much as it looks at Anderson’s early fiction from contemporary interpretative methodologies, particularly from poststructuralist approaches. With this study, author Robert Dunne breaks new ground in Sherwood Anderson scholarship: his is the first sustained, full-length critical work on Anderson from a postmodern theoretical perspective and is the first study of a substantial body of Anderson’s work to be published in more than thirty years.

One of the most important funerary monuments in Europe is the tomb of Napoleon, built in the Church of the Invalides in Paris between 1840 and 1861. As Befits a Legend is the first comprehensive examination of its construction process, historical context, and political and social meanings. It also is the only work published in English about this unique structure. Michael Paul Driskel’s study, based on extensive archival research in France, documents the problems inherent in building the appropriate monument for such a controversial figure and the public debate it generated. Following a detailed and illuminating account of the range of proposals put forward, Driskel concludes that the form of the structure represents a symbolic mediation of conflicting demands.

Based upon extensive multi-archival research, John Dreifort provides clear evidence that France was not as pro-appeasement toward the Japanese as conventionally thought, and that French policymakers frequently had clearer insight into the dangers and opportunities which exited in the Far East than did statesmen of other major Western powers in the area.

Famous for his modernist fiction, Ohio native Sherwood Anderson has long been recognized almost exclusively as a prose writer despite his prolific published output of poetry between 1915 and 1939. In American Spring Song, editor Stuart Downs reintroduces readers to a body of work rarely seen and never before studied.

Recently and increasingly, literary and philosophical scholars are subscribing to the view that philosophy and literature are allies. However, nearly all of these scholars have concentrated on analyses of Greek philosophers and dramatists as well as English novels and novelists with reference to the nature of a good society and a moral life. The essays presented in A Community of Inquiry explore often-neglected works: classical American philosophy, especially pragmatism, and American literature, particularly the realists and naturalists, and mostly ignored fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.