In a world which crowds people and events into split-seconds of time, Jerry Dickey's Christmas story characters guide us into retreats that fill us with hope and inspiration.

Best remembered today for her acclaimed 1928 expressionist drama "Machinal," based in part on the infamous murder trial of Ruth Snyder, Sophie Treadwell was an innovative American dramatist whose career spanned almost 60 years and nearly 40 plays. A relentless experimenter in dramatic subjects, styles, and forms, Treadwell was one of a select number of American women playwrights who also actively produced and directed their own works. She was also a professional journalist, and she constantly used her writings to explore women's personal and social struggles for independence and equality. This is the first book to chronicle her many achievements. The volume includes a career and biographical overview, detailed plot summaries and critical introductions to her plays, an annotated bibliography of works by and about her, and an exhaustive production history.

Studies of American theatre have too long omitted the accomplishments of Sophie Treadwell. Although best remembered today for only a single work, the explosive 1928 drama "Machinal," Treadwell maintained a career in the theatre that spanned close to 60 years and included the authorship of approximately 40 plays. At a time when women playwrights were growing steadily among the ranks of Broadway dramatists, Treadwell was one of a select few of these women who also actively produced and directed their own plays. She became a relentless and articulate advocate for the commercial and artistic rights afforded playwrights on Broadway and around the world. She experimented with a range of dramatic structures and styles, and often tackled timely or controversial subjects which she knew would prove unpopular with commercial producers. Most significantly, she continually placed female characters in subject positions in her plays and dramatized women's personal and social struggles for independence and equality.

In spite of her achievements, Treadwell has been largely overlooked. But after highly prominent revivals of DEGREESIMachinal DEGREESR by the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990 and London's Royal National Theatre in 1993, she has begun to be recognized for her enormous contributions to the American stage. This volume is a comprehensive reference guide to her life and work. A biography and chronology summarize the most important events in her career. The book then presents summaries and critical overviews of her many plays. The work includes an extensive annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and it concludes with production histories for her works.

Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell presents critical introductions to two of the most significant American dramatists of the early twentieth century. Glaspell and Treadwell led American Theatre from outdated melodrama to the experimentation of great European playwrights like Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw.

This is the first book to deal with Glaspell and Treadwell 's plays from a theatrical, rather than literary, perspective, and presents a comprehensive overview of their work from lesser known plays to seminal productions of Trifles and Machinal.

Although each woman pursued her own themes, subjects and manner of stage production, this shared volume underscores the theatrical and cultural conditions influencing female playwrights in modern America.

In this book, the author offers a wide variety of Christmas short stories written over a 40-year span of time. Written for adults, these stories start with a Christmas letter created in 1965 and conclude with a story penned in 2003. Each timeless story is unique in its setting and offers a tug at the heart strings of the reader. Readers will find stories that take place in New York City, Appalachia, Bethlehem, Europe, and the mid-west. In each story, the characters are thoughtfully crafted to touch your heart with hope. Time and again, they return to the eternal message of the love of God, and to the gifts of human lives caught in common moments of time.
The cover design by Patsy Ashley Given, a personal friend of the author, with its velvet dark blues and purples invites one into a constellation of lights suggesting that moments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can light our pathways far into the future. Following each story, readers encounter an enchanting piece of artwork that serves as a visual exclamation point to a personal journey with the words of the author. It represents the intense depth encountered by the illustrator in response to the touching characters revealed in The Twelve Days Of Christmas.
This book would be a wonderful Christmas gift, as it will go on giving year after year. It could well find a permanent place on the coffee table to share gifts of hope for all seasons to its readers, and to remind each reader that all of us can make a divine difference within our common, very human moments of time.