Updike remains both a critical and popular success; however, because Updike asked that his personal letters not be published the only way that Updike scholars and fans can read more of the author's candid and insightful remarks is to revisit some of the many interviews he granted-most of which are difficult to locate or obtain. Updike wrote about his home town of Reading in Berks County, Pennsylvania for much of his adult life, setting most of his early fiction and all of his award-winning novels in his home state. In John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews, James Plath has compiled the first collection of interviews that illustrates and helps to explain the bond between one of America's greatest literary talents and his beloved Pennsylvania. Included in this volume are interviews and articles by Mark Abrams, Leonard W. Boasberg, Carl W. Brown, Jr., David Cheshire, Marty Crisp, Sean Diviny, John Mark Eberhart, William Ecenbarger, Elizabeth Greenwood, Ruth Heimbuecher, Dorothy Lehman Hoerr, Jim Homan, Tom Knapp, Karen L. Miller, Steve Neal, Richard E. Nicholls, Sanford Pinsker, James Plath, Bruce Posten, Carole Reber, Pamela Rohland, Carlin Romano, Daniel Rubin, Stephan Salisbury, Charles R. Shaw, Ellen Sulkis, Heather Thomas, Stanley J. Watkins, Michael L. Wentzel, and Robert F. Zissa.

Updike remains both a critical and popular success; however, because Updike asked that his personal letters not be published the only way that Updike scholars and fans can read more of the author's candid and insightful remarks is to revisit some of the many interviews he granted-most of which are difficult to locate or obtain. Updike wrote about his home town of Reading in Berks County, Pennsylvania for much of his adult life, setting most of his early fiction and all of his award-winning novels in his home state. In John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews, James Plath has compiled the first collection of interviews that illustrates and helps to explain the bond between one of America's greatest literary talents and his beloved Pennsylvania. Included in this volume are interviews and articles by Mark Abrams, Leonard W. Boasberg, Carl W. Brown, Jr., David Cheshire, Marty Crisp, Sean Diviny, John Mark Eberhart, William Ecenbarger, Elizabeth Greenwood, Ruth Heimbuecher, Dorothy Lehman Hoerr, Jim Homan, Tom Knapp, Karen L. Miller, Steve Neal, Richard E. Nicholls, Sanford Pinsker, James Plath, Bruce Posten, Carole Reber, Pamela Rohland, Carlin Romano, Daniel Rubin, Stephan Salisbury, Charles R. Shaw, Ellen Sulkis, Heather Thomas, Stanley J. Watkins, Michael L. Wentzel, and Robert F. Zissa.

When Ernest Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, presenters called him "one of this epoch’s great molders of style,” praising his vivid dialogue and journalistic eye for "robust details to accumulate and take on momentous significance.” But even the Swedish Academy could not separate Hemingway the writer from Hemingway the adventurer. They also cited his "manly love of danger and adventure, with a natural admiration for every individual who fights the good fight in a world of reality overshadowed by violence and death.” From the 1920s until his death in 1961, "Papa” Hemingway was a larger-than-life literary figure whose everyday exploits became legendary. He was a friend of celebrities, a war correspondent, journalist, renowned big-game hunter, record-setting saltwater angler, and hard-drinking brawler whose reputation preceded him. Though Hemingway was and remains an American icon, he was also first and foremost a human being, as these striking black-and-white photos remind.

Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina, Harry Potter, Hester Prynne...these are just a handful of remarkable characters to be found in literature, but of course, the list of memorable characters is virtually endless! But why ponder which of these creations are the greatest? More than just a topic to debate with friends, the greatest characters from fiction help readers comprehend history, culture, politics, and even their own place in today's world. Despite our reliance on television, film, and technology, it is literature's great characters that create and reinforce popular culture, informing us again and again about society and ourselves. In The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, three scholars of literature identify the most significant figures in fiction published over the last several centuries. From Jay Gatsby to Jean Valjean, the characters profiled here represent a wide array of storytelling, and the authors explore each one's significance at the time they were created as well as their relevance today. Included in this volume are characters from literature produced around the world, such as Aladdin, James Bond, Holden Caulfield, Hercule Poirot, Don Quixote, Lisbeth Salander, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Yuri Zhivago. Readers of this volume will find their beloved literary figures, learn about forgotten gems, or discover deserving choices pulled from history's dustbin. Providing insights into how literature shapes and molds culture via these fabricated figures, The 100 Greatest Literary Characters will appeal to literature lovers around the globe.

New scholarly essays providing a multifaceted approach to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work. Hemingway's two extended African safaris, the first in the 1930s and the second in the 1950s, gave rise to two of his best-known stories ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"), a considerable amount of journalism and correspondence, and two nonfiction books, Green Hills of Africa (1935), about the first safari, and True at First Light (1999; longer version, Under Kilimanjaro 2005), about the second.Africa also figures largely in his important posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986). The variety and quantity of this literary output indicate clearly that Africa was a major factor in the creative life of this influential American author. But surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work. To start the long-delayed conversation on this topic, this book offers historical, theoretical, biographical, theological, and literary interpretations of Hemingway's African narratives. It also presents a wide-ranging introduction, a detailed chronology of the safaris, a complete bibliography of Hemingway's published and unpublished African works, an up-to-date, annotated review of the scholarship on the African works, and a bibliography of Hemingway's reading on natural history and other topics relevant to Africa and the world of the safari. Contributors: Silvio Calabi, Suzanne del Gizzo, Beatriz Penas Ibanez, Jeremiah M. Kitunda, Kelli A. Larson, Miriam B. Mandel, Frank Mehring, Philip H. Melling, Erik G. R. Nakjavani, James Plath, and Chikako Tanimoto. Miriam B. Mandel is retired as Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.

John Updike says: Any act of description is, to some extent, an act of praise, so that even when the event is unpleasant or horrifying or spiritually stunning, the very attempt to describe it is, in some way, part of that Old Testament injunction to give praise. Even though my books strike many people as immoral or morally useless, to me they are really moral investigations of how we live, and harsh, perhaps, because the standards are otherworldly. There was a tradition among my peers for frank and open talk, and I'd always been a rather shy, priggish, unexperienced adolescent. So maybe my revenge as a young adult was to put down all the dirty words that I'd always been a little shy about using. James Plath, a professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, is editor-publisher of "Clockwatch Review" and director of Hemingway Days Writer's Workshop and Conference in Key West.