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The legendary Davy Crockett arose simultaneously with the emergence
of the historical Crockett as a public figure, and once
established, the man and the myth were forevermore entangled. The
present work, his Life and Adventures (1833), ushered in a series
of biographical and autobiographical books that thrust Crockett
fully onto the national and international scene. This work, quickly
retitled Sketches and Eccentricities, was the most outlandish. Its
purported author, J. S. French, mixed two nineteenth-century genres
of storytelling - the Humor of the Old Southwest and the sketch -
all presented within a historical framework to create an early
version of the King of the Wild Frontier. The Crockett encountered
here is the marksman who can shoot an elk from 140 yards with his
beloved rifle, Betsy, grin the bark off a tree knot, and choose
bows and arrows as weapons when challenged to a duel by a fellow
congressman. Within a year, Crockett disavowed this book,
preferring his autobiography - Narrative of the Life of David
Crockett, of the State of Tennessee - but this rollicking story,
often bouncing along from tall tale, hunting anecdote, faux moral
tale, to humorous pratfall, became a major source for the later
biographical writings and a later cultural industry that swept up
newspapers, books, political propaganda, plays, and films - and
almost every way in which a frontier figure could appear in popular
culture. And, while Crockett's image was a source of entertainment
and humor, it also pointed toward something far more serious: after
his death at the Alamo it presented Americans with a fictional
Frontier hero who progressively embodied their views on topics as
varied as manliness, manifest destiny, and even white supremacy.
However, the Crockett of Sketches - canny, adaptable, intelligent
but not educated, hilarious - was above all a perfect reflection of
the aspirations, interests, and beliefs of Jacksonian-era
Americans.
Although name such as Daniel Boone, Black Hawk, and "Davy" Crockett
are familiar to most Americans, the historical, political, and
literary contexts that produced the mythical images of these
figures are unfamiliar to most outside academia. In Boone, Black
Hawk, and Crockett in 1833,Michael A. Lofaro compiles, annotates,
and analyzes three (auto)biographical writings published in
Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1833-The Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone;
Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk; and The Life and
Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee-to reveal how the portrayals
of Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett revised the idea of the
"frontier hero." By placing them together in dialogue through the
scholarly reediting of their texts, Lofaro demonstrates that these
works exemplify, typify, and epitomize masculinity, burgeoning
capitalism, and Jacksonian democracy, probe beliefs in race and
class, and provide nothing short of a deep dissection of the
frontier mentality of the antebellum period. Additionally, the
reception of these works influenced the ways in which
nineteenth-century Americans understood and perceived manifest
destiny, the removal of Native Americans from their homelands, to
the west of the Mississippi River, and the waning concept of
"American frontier." With its great scope and insight, this
publication creates connections among many academic disciplines,
including colonial America, Jacksonian America, Native American
studies, as well as literary and folklore studies.
The embodiment of the American hero, Daniel Boone personifies the
great adventure of his age - the westward movement of the American
people. The prototype for the frontiersman, he was a multifaceted
individual who shaped and was driven by the complex forces of this
dynamic period in history. Daniel Boone: An American Life brings
together over thirty years of research in this extraordinary
biography. Based on primary sources, the book depicts Boone through
the eyes of those who knew him and within the historical contexts
of his eighty-six years. Boone's story offers new insights into the
turbulent birth of the nation and demonstrates why the frontier
forms such a significant part of the American experience.
Davy Crockett has been America's best-known folk hero for at least
160 years. This informed biography by James Atkins Shackford first
appeared in 1956, at the height of the television-inspired Crockett
craze. As Michael Lofaro notes in his introduction, "Shackford
faced the monumental task of rescuing a nearly unknown David
Crockett from the obscurity caused by the popularity of the earlier
legendary Davys and deepened by Disney." He succeeded memorably,
restoring David Crockett of Tennessee, a true pioneer and colorful
figure even without romantic trappings.
" The embodiment of the American hero, the man of action, the
pathfinder, Daniel Boone represents the great adventure of his age
-- the westward movement of the American people. Daniel Boone: An
American Life brings together over thirty years of research in an
extraordinary biography of the quintessential pioneer. Based on
primary sources, the book depicts Boone through the eyes of those
who knew him and within the historical contexts of his eighty-six
years. The story of Daniel Boone offers new insights into the
turbulent birth and growth of the nation and demonstrates why the
frontier forms such a significant part of the American
experience.
Most widely noted for his acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family,
Tennessee native James Agee was also a journalist, film critic,
poet, and screenwriter. More than fifty years after Agee's untimely
death, his canon of work continues to grow in popularity, and his
ability to capture the human condition in all its forms remains
unparalleled. Agee Agonistes is a compilation of seventeen essays
from the James Agee Celebration hosted by the University of
Tennessee in April 2005. The collection includes some of the best
interpretations of Agee's work and explores the influences on his
art, delineates the connections and syntheses he makes within his
texts, and examines his involvement in music, ethics, surrealism,
local and national history, cinema, television, poetry, literature,
sociology, and journalism. The volume features never-before-seen
pictures of Agee, previously unknown correspondence, and a
remembrance by his oldest daughter, Deedee. The volume also
includes the most extensive bibliography of secondary sources on
Agee assembled to date. The essays are divided into four parts:
Agee's Influences and Syntheses-Contributors: Paul Sprecher,
William Bruce Wheeler, Jack Neely, Jeffrey J. Folks, Hugh Davis,
Paul Ashdown Agee's Films-Contributors: Daniel Feller, Jeffrey
Couchman, Mary E. Papke, John Wranovics Agee's
Literature-Contributors: Fred Chappell, Angie Maxwell, John H.
Summers, James A. Crank, Michael A. Lofaro Agee's
Correspondence-Contributor: Brian Gempp. In addition, the volume
includes an introductory essay entitled "Mapping Agee's Myriad
Mind" by noted author David Madden. Agee Agonistes will be of
interest to all those who study twentieth-century America and will
introduce a new generation of readers to James Agee. Michael Lofaro
is professor of American literature and American and Cultural
Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has authored
and edited numerous volumes and is coeditor, with Hugh Davis, of
James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men and Other New Manuscripts. He is also the general editor for
the ten-volume series, The Works of James Agee, and the editor of
its forthcoming first volume, A Death in the Family: A Restoration
of the Author's Text.
In his introduction to this edition of "Daniel Boone: Master of the
Wilderness," Michael A. Lofaro, a professor of English at the
University of Tennessee and the author of "The Life and Adventures
of Daniel Boone," assesses John Bakeless's achievement: "After
fifty years his is still the standard by which all other
biographies of the frontiersman are judged."
It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the many new works
by James Agee uncovered and published in the last twenty years.
These previously unknown primary works have, in turn, encouraged a
parallel explosion of critical evaluation and reevaluation by
scholars, to which James Agee in Context is the latest
contribution. This superb collection from well-known James Agee
scholars features myriad approaches and contexts for understanding
the author’s fiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. The
essays bring the reader from the streets of James Agee’s New York
to travel with the author from Alabama to Hollywood to Havana.
Contributors explore overlapping and sometimes unique subjects,
themes, and accomplishments (or lack thereof) in Agee’s uncovered
works and highlight the diversity of interest that Agee’s
complete body of work inspires. The insightful scholarship on
influence examines connections between Agee and Wright Morris,
Helen Levitt, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Crane.
Such juxtapositions serve to illustrate how Agee drew on literary
influences as a young man, how he used his work as a journalist to
craft fiction as he was about to turn thirty, and his influence
upon others. The volume concludes with three poems and a short
story by Agee, all previously unknown. It seems astonishing that so
much remains to be discovered about this protean author, his
materials, and his circle. Yet, the recovery and analysis of
neglected texts and information mined from newspapers and magazines
proves the extent to which Agee kept his mind and his work, as he
himself put it, “patiently concentrated upon the essential
quietudes of the human soul.”
These never before collected or reprinted tales, were part of the
original primary force that created the tall tale Davy Crockett.
The Nashville almanacs significantly contributed to the development
of the Davy Crockett myths. Two-thirds of the tales found in this
edition have never before been collected or reprinted in any
readily accessible form.
Published in 1957 to wide acclaim, James Agee's A Death in the
Family was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature.
However, the novel had been so heavily edited by publisher and
editor David McDowell that it little resembled the manuscript that
James Agee had completed at the time of his death. The inaugural
title of the University of Tennessee Press's scholarly edition of
The Works of James Agee, this restored text of A Death in the
Family is, in many ways, a new novel. This volume provides, for the
first time, a modern critical edition of Agee's manuscript, a novel
based upon his childhood and his attempts to understand the death
of his father. The new introduction is a revealing nightmare rather
than an idyllic reverie; the book includes ten and one-third
previously omitted chapters, substitutes three finished chapters
for erroneously printed drafts, and is divided into forty-five
chapters rather than twenty; it is chronological and has no
flashback chapters; real names of people and places are used, as
are more regional speech patterns; and young Rufus (based on young
James), his father, and their deep and caring relationship are far
more fully developed. All are changes that showcase the intended
autobiographical realism of the novel. This comprehensive edition
also provides the reader with an introductory essay, a way to read
the McDowell edition from it for purposes of comparison, Agee's
draft of his memories of his father's death, unfinished letters to
his parents, manuscript variants, and textual notes which document
each part of the reconstruction. The edition has received the
approval of the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern
Language Association. Wonderfully evocative, this exciting
reconstruction of A Death in the Family provides a firmer sense of
Agee's achievement as a writer of creative non-fiction and presents
his literary genius to a new generation of readers. Michael A.
Lofaro is professor of American literature and American and
cultural studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has
authored and edited numerous volumes, most recently Agee Agonistes:
Essays on the Life, Legend, and Works of James Agee.
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