The Belle of Amherst

The Belle of Amherst
Author: William Luce
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822233738

THE STORY: In her Amherst, Massachusetts home, the reclusive nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson recollects her past through her work, her diaries and letters, and a few encounters with significant people in her life. William Luce’s classic play shows us both the pain and the joy of Dickinson’s secluded life.

Lives Like Loaded Guns

Lives Like Loaded Guns
Author: Lyndall Gordon
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101190191

In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon, an award-winning biographer, tells the riveting story of the Dickinsons, and reveals Emily as a very different woman from the pale, lovelorn recluse that exists in the popular imagination. Thanks to unprecedented use of letters, diaries, and legal documents, Gordon digs deep into the life and work of Emily Dickinson, to reveal the secret behind the poet's insistent seclusion, and presents a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual sustenance, and immortality all on her own terms. An enthralling story of creative genius, filled with illicit passion and betrayal, Lives Like Loaded Guns is sure to cause a stir among Dickinson's many devoted readers and scholars.

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet
Author: Julie Dobrow
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393249271

“Scandal and pathos abound” (The New Yorker) in this riveting account of the mother and daughter who brought Emily Dickinson’s genius to light. Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography • Finalist for the Plutarch Award Despite Emily Dickinson’s renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication—Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham—has remained in the shadows of the archives. Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow reveals the intrigue of Dickinson’s literary beginnings, including Mabel’s tumultuous affair with Emily’s brother, Austin Dickinson, controversial editorial decisions, and a battle over the right to define the so-called Belle of Amherst.

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries
Author: Elizabeth A. Petrino
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780874519075

An interdisciplinary examination of the poet, her milieu, and the ways she and her contemporaries freed their work from cultural limitations.

White Heat

White Heat
Author: Brenda Wineapple
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2009-12-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307456307

White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century. In White Heat Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love, one that sheds new light on her subjects and on the roiling America they shared.

Maid as Muse

Maid as Muse
Author: Aife Murray
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781584656746

A startlingly original work establishing the impact of domestic servants on the life and writings of Emily Dickinson

Austin and Mabel

Austin and Mabel
Author: Polly Longsworth
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781558492158

A true tale of illicit love in the era of Emily Dickinson. The author adds her own annotations to correspondence, journals, diaries and the observations of the protagonists' peers, to paint a detailed picture of social and sexual mores in 19th-century America.

The Emily Dickinson Collection

The Emily Dickinson Collection
Author: Emily Dickinson
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Total Pages: 646
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1513297139

The Emily Dickinson Collection (2021) compiles some of the best-known works of an icon of American poetry. Out of nearly two-thousand poems discovered after her death, less than a dozen appeared in print during Dickinson’s lifetime. Drawn from such influential posthumous volumes as Poems (1902) and The Single Hound (1914), The Emily Dickinson Collection captures the spiritual depths, celebratory heights, and impenetrable mystery of Dickinson’s poetic gift. “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate, / Whose table once a Guest, but not / The second time, is set.” Deeply aware of the fleeting nature of fame, Dickinson—whose reputation in life was as a lonely eccentric who rarely, if ever, left home—seems to provide some clarity as to why publication so often eluded her. Having published just ten poems in her lifetime, Dickinson continued to write in solitude until her final years. Her final word on fame is a warning, perhaps, for poets whose fate would differ from her own: “Men eat of it and die.” Despite her admonishing tone, she found space elsewhere to muse on the nature of literary achievement, recognizing that obscurity could incidentally produce the conditions for a poet to produce their most vital work: “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need.” Throughout her life, Emily Dickinson showed a profound respect for the mysteries of worldly existence. In her poems, this creates an atmosphere of prayer and contemplation, a search for something beyond the simple answers: “Some things that fly there be, — / Birds, hours, the bumble-bee: / Of these no elegy.” Amid such fleeting things, she catches a glimpse of eternity. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Emily Dickinson Collection is a classic of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

Barrymore

Barrymore
Author: William Luce
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
Total Pages: 60
Release: 1998
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780573642401

Christopher Plummer won a Tony for his portrayal of John Barrymore in the acclaimed Broadway production of this work by the master of one-character biographies for the stage.