A Full-Circle Moment: Three Pittsburgh Institutions Work to Secure August Wilson’s Legacy

Posted by on Sep 12, 2022 in | Comments Off on A Full-Circle Moment: Three Pittsburgh Institutions Work to Secure August Wilson’s Legacy August Wilson seemed perturbed when he met journalist Abiola Sinclair for a May 1990 interview in his favorite nook in the lobby of New York’s famed Edison Hotel. This candid session, published later in New York Amsterdam News, included the exasperated playwright’s charge that — despite having four of his American Century Cycle plays performed on Broadway — his work had not received the...
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John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews by James Plath

Posted by on Mar 13, 2017 in | Comments Off on John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews by James Plath John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews edited by James Plath Lehigh University Press, 294 pp., cloth $85 Born in Reading, Berks County, and raised in nearby Shillington and Plowville, author John Updike, like the main character Harry Angstrom in his Rabbit series of novels, often tried to escape Pennsylvania in his literary work, but he always seemed to come back home. This book, with its...
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Updike by Adam Begley

Posted by on May 8, 2015 in | Comments Off on Updike by Adam Begley Updike by Adam Begley HarperCollins, 558 pp., cloth $29.95 “No, no, no, no, no, to paraphrase King Lear,” John Updike told me 12 years ago when I suggested he consider authorizing a biographer. “Please don’t ruin the rest of my life with any talk of a biography, that living death.” Updike’s opposition to literary biography was so fierce it’s no surprise his widow, Martha Updike, refused to...
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Stability and Change: Culture During Three Periods

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Stability and Change: Culture During Three Periods “Religion, … the best bond of human society, provided man did not err in the meaning of that excellent word.” – William Penn   Culture, broadly de­fined, is the way of life of a group of people; it includes all their behavioral patterns, beliefs and ar­tistic expressions. Culture is not static; it varies over time and place. Culture does not arise in a vacuum; it...
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Driving Team In The Big Woods

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Driving Team In The Big Woods During the early days of lumbering in Pennsylvania, small water-powered, up-and­-down sawmills were located wherever the best trees stood in the stream valleys. Only the best, most accessible trees were cut and hauled to the mill by oxen or horses or occasionally floated on the stream which powered the mill. The saw­ed boards were then carried out of the woods on wagons or sleds to villages...
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“Little Doc”: Architect Of Modern Nursing

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on “Little Doc”: Architect Of Modern Nursing Lavinia Lloyd Dock (1858-1956) labored long and hard as educator, settlement worker, historian, author, editor, columnist, pacifist and radical suffragist. Beyond this, she strove to internationalize the public health movement while continually elevating the status of women. But her contributions to the field of nursing­ – which helped transform what was then a despised trade into a...
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Schuylkill County: Built on Coal

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Schuylkill County: Built on Coal The history of Schuylkill County is inextricably bound to the story – and drama – of the great anthracite industry in the United States. Despite nearly two centuries of active mining, the county’s 783 square miles still boast the largest accessible reserves of hard coal known in the world. Its lives and lifestyles have been quasi-fictionalized by two of the county’s best...
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Pittsburgh’s Park of a Century

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pittsburgh’s Park of a Century Currently ranked first as the Most Livable City by the Rand-McNally annual survey, Pittsburgh is reveling in media exposure comparable to the boosterism of the town of Zenith which writer Sinclair Lewis satirized in his novel, Babbit. Accompanying the zealous, self-proclaimed promotion, however, has been a healthy dose of self­-examination, with the city’s less enviable qualities suddenly...
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The Wissahickon Valley: To a Wilderness Returned

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Wissahickon Valley: To a Wilderness Returned The rural Wissahickon Valley, near center-city Philadelphia, typifies the rugged landscape which greeted the first white settlers. Today, its huge hem­locks and towering sycamores contrast markedly with the busy factories and row houses only a mile away. But this valley of contrasts has always been different from the sur­rounding region. A century ago, when most of America was rural or wild, the...
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The Man Who Bought Alice in Wonderland

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Man Who Bought Alice in Wonderland On April 3, 1928, a slightly tipsy world, still reeling through the heady Twen­ties, focused its attention on Sotheby’s in London, where one of history’s most famous and beloved of all books was about to be auctioned. Through Sotheby’s dark pas­sages, an excited throng tum­bled into the large auction gallery to see who would offer the winning bid for Lewis Carroll’s...
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