Professor Lauren Coodley reviews the life of writer and activist Upton Sinclair. She focuses on the details of his life not commonly included in his popular image as a "muckraker."
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center preserves and interprets Stowe's Hartford home and the Center's historic collections, promotes vibrant discussion of her life and work, and inspires commitment to social justice and positive change. A visit to the Center includes the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, a Victorian Gothic Revival home (1871) which includes Victorian-style gardens; the Katharine Seymour Day House (1884), a mansion adjacent to the Stowe House; and the Stowe Visitor Center (1873), with changing exhibitions.
The center offers exhibits, tours, reference library access, and occasional recreational and educational events.
Visitors to this Florida homestead can walk back in time to 1930s farm life. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and worked in the tiny community of Cross Creek. Her cracker-style home and farm, where she lived for 25 years and wrote her Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Yearling, has been restored and is preserved as it was when she lived here.
A second website for the site, maintained by the Friends of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm, can be found here.
The park offers tours, exhibits, and occasional recreational and educational events.
Willa Cather, Nebraska's Pulitzer Prize-winning author, spent her formative years in Red Cloud. Many of the scenes and characters in her writings are based on the people, streets, and landscapes Cather encountered here in her youth. Visitors to the site encounter eight period structures that influenced her writing, including her childhood home; the Catholic and Episcopal churches; the Garber Bank; the Burlington Depot; and the Pavelka Farmstead, home of Annie Pavelka, the basis for the title character of Cather's most famous novel, My Antonia.
A second website for the site, maintained by the Cather Foundation, can be found here.
The site offers exhibits, tours, research library access, and occasional recreational and educational events.
Thomas Wolfe left an indelible mark on American letters. His mother's boardinghouse in Asheville—now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial—has become one of literature's most famous landmarks. Named "Old Kentucky Home" by a previous owner, the rambling Victorian structure was immortalized by Wolfe as "Dixieland" in his epic autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Restored to look as it did in the early 20th century when young Tom Wolfe and Mrs. Wolfe's boarders shared a roof, the house evokes a time and a place that inspired one of the South's greatest writers.
The site offers a short film, exhibits, tours, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events.
The Association for Preservation of Historic Natchitoches seeks to preserve areas of historic value in the oldest settlement in the Louisiana Purchase Territory. The Association maintains the Melrose Plantation and the Kate Chopin House. The Melrose story begins with Marie Therese Coincoin, a slave born in 1742; she was eventually she sold to a Frenchmen, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer. In time, Metoyer freed Marie Therese and 10 Franco-African children. Evidence points to Metoyer as the father of these children. Marie Therese and son Louis Metoyer received large grants of land including the present Melrose Plantation. This Creole-style home celebrates its most famous resident, Kate Chopin, and its original inhabitant, Alexis Cloutier. Built by slave labor between 1805 and 1809, the structure exemplifies the early 19th-century homes of the area.
The association offers occasional recreational and educational events; the plantation offers tours; the house offers exhibits and tours.
The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum properties includes eight buildings: six historically significant buildings and two interactive museums whose collections include 15 original Norman Rockwell paintings. A self-guided tour of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum properties gives visitors the chance to explore the Hannibal of Samuel Clemens's childhood and experience the beloved stories he created as Mark Twain through the power of his imagination.
The site offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and recreational and educational events.
The Society is committed to the preservation and interpretation of Arrowhead, home of author Herman Melville, the first National Historic Landmark to be so designated in Berkshire County. The author's study, piazza, the original fireplace from his short story "I and My Chimney" and the restored barn in which Melville and Hawthorne spent hours discussing their writings are all open to the public. The Society has also restored the North Meadow preserving the view of Mount Greylock which was a major inspiration to Melville.
The society offers research library access and occasional recreational and educational events; the museum offers exhibits and tours.
From the University of Kansas website:
Participants in this institute will engage in a "conversation that not only looks at why Wright was so influential during his lifetime, but more importantly why he matters to us today. We will take a closer look—and get a fuller sense of—Wright's world, that America that he knew and wrote about. How we can find ways of connecting his world and ours for our students, we will ask, as we focus on Wright's three major books: Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy (1945). This will be a rare opportunity to read, research, write and create as you participate actively in the Institute's seminars, discussion groups and workshops and build lasting relationships with other teachers and Wright specialists."
During the 1850s, the United States was a nation of foreboding and hope. An irresolvable conflict between North and South seemed to be approaching, along with periodic hopes that the divide could somehow be bridged and conflict forestalled. At the start of the decade, the nation's eloquent orators were led by John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster; 10 years later, a new voice had been added to public discourse: that of Abraham Lincoln. Literary artists—including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—addressed the issues of slavery, regional autonomy, and federal power both directly and obliquely in poetry and prose. This seminar will explore this ominous yet hopeful era, with the aim of understanding the political and moral issues that drove Americans apart, and how the literature of the period can help readers understand why.