Douglas Moore

MLA Index and Bibliography Series vol. 36 Additional information online at https://www.areditions.com/books/IB036.html

From Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston to Lionel Trilling and Lou Gehrig, Columbia University has been home to some of the most important historians, scientists, critics, artists, physicians, and social scientists of the twentieth century. (It can also boast a hall-of-fame athlete.) In Living Legacies at Columbia, contributors with close personal ties to their subjects capture Columbia's rich intellectual history. Essays span the birth of genetics and modern anthropology, constitutionalism from John Jay to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Virginia Apgar's test, Lou Gehrig's swing, journalism education, black power, public health, the development of Asian studies, the Great Books Movement, gender studies, human rights, and numerous other realms of teaching and discovery. They include Eric Foner on historian Richard Hoftstader, Isaac Levi and Sidney Hook on John Dewey, David Rosand on art historian Meyer Schapiro, John Hollander on critic Mark Van Doren, Donald Keene on Asian studies, Jacques Barzun on history, Eric Kandel on geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, and Rosalind Rosenberg on Franz Boas and his three most famous pupils: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston. Much more than an institutional history, Living Legacies captures the spirit of a great university through the stories of gifted men and women who have worked, taught, and studied at Columbia. It includes stories of struggle and breakthrough, searching and discovery, tradition and transformation.

Born into a poor Virginian family, John Treville Latouche (1914-56), in his short life, made a profound mark on America's musical theater as a lyricist, book writer, and librettist. The wit and skill of his lyrics elicited comparisons with the likes of Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter, but he had too, noted Stephen Sondheim, a large vision of what musical theater could be, and he proved especially venturesome in helping to develop a lyric theater that innovatively combined music, word, dance, and costume and set design. Many of his pieces, even if not commonly known today, remain high points in the history of American musical theater. A great American genius in the words of Duke Ellington, Latouche initially came to wide public attention in his early twenties with his cantata for soloist and chorus, Ballad for Americans (1939), with music by Earl Robinson-a work that swept the nation during the Second World War. Other milestones in his career included the all-black musical fable, Cabin in the Sky (1940), with Vernon Duke; an interracial updating of John Gay's classic, The Beggar's Opera, as Beggar's Holiday (1946), with Duke Ellington; two acclaimed Broadway operas with Jerome Moross: Ballet Ballads (1948) and The Golden Apple (1954); one of the most enduring operas in the American canon, The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), with Douglas Moore; and the operetta Candide (1956), with Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman. Extremely versatile, he also wrote cabaret songs, participated in documentary and avant-garde film, translated poetry, adapted plays, and much else. Meanwhile, as one of Manhattan's most celebrated raconteurs and hosts, he developed a wide range of friends in the arts, including, to name only a few, Paul and Jane Bowles (whom he introduced to each other), Yul Brynner, John Cage, Jack Kerouac, Frederick Kiesler, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Dawn Powell, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams-a dazzling constellation of diverse artists working in sundry fields, all attracted to Latouche's brilliance and joie de vivre, not to mention his support for their work. This book draws widely on archival collections both at home and abroad, including Latouche's diaries and the papers of Bernstein, Ellington, Moore, Moross, and many others, to tell for the first time, the story of this fascinating man and his work.

Colonel Donald Gilbert Cook was the first U.S. Marine captured in Vietnam, the first and only Marine in history to earn the Medal of Honor while in captivity; and the first Marine POW to have a U.S. Navy ship named in his honor, the USS Donald Cook (DDG-75). On December 31, 1964, while serving as an observer with a South Vietnamese Marine Corps battalion on a combat operation against Viet Cong forces, he was captured near the village of Binh Gia in South Vietnam. Until his death in captivity in December 1967, Cook led ten POWs in a series of primitive jungle camps. This first book-length biography concentrates especially on Cook’s three years in captivity, and is the first book exclusively about a Marine POW held in South Vietnam. Throughout, Cook’s adherence to the Corps’ traditional leadership principles and knowledge of the Code of Conduct are highlighted. His biography provides a unique case study of exemplary leadership under extremely difficult conditions. Includes 68 photographs.

Includes touching stories of treasured pets who return to comfort their grieving owners and warn them of imminent danger, fire, or intruders. This book also includes many more supernatural experiences and encounters with beloved pets that simply cannot be explained away.

The first major treatment of the American art song in more than 40 years. In Volume I: America Comes of Age, Friedberg examines the transition from the European-influenced songs of MacDowell, Loeffler, and Griffes, to the consciously "American" style of Ives, Copland, Harris, and other 20th-century composers. Volume II: Voices of Maturity treats composers born just before or after 1900 and their response to the flood of poetry by American writers in the early 20th century. Volume III: The Century Advances begins where its predecessor ended, with composers born in the second decade of this century, and discusses songs written roughly between 1940 and 1980. Among the 16 composers treated: Samuel Barber, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, Vincent Persichetti, Jean Eichelberger Ivey, Ned Rorem, and Richard Hundley. Among the 26 poets: James Agee, Tennessee Williams, Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens, Stephen Crane, Peter Viereck, Theodore Roethke, and James Purdy.

The first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life. In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims. Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles. With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clément's famous description of opera as "the undoing of women," while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then.