Louis D. Rubin's Books

The Curious Death of the Novel

Essays in American Literature

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

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The Curious Death of the Novel

Essays in American Literature

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

One of the country’s more perceptive younger critics, Louis Rubin is well known for his commentaries on the literature of the South. These essays—selected from his critical works over a period of more than a dozen years—reflect his wider concern with the whole spectrum of American literature. In the title essay Rubin treats “tired literary critics” and the often-heard pronouncement that the novel is dead. He argues that the response of novelists to our difficult and demanding times “will doubtless be what the response of writers to difficult and demanding times always has been: namely, difficult and demanding works of literature.” Another essay, “The Experience Difference: Southerners and Jews,” is a perceptive examination of the parallels in different factors and cultural experiences which brought Southern and Jewish writers to prominence. Rubin explores the potential pitfalls for Southern writers today in an essay called “Getting Out From Under William Faulkner.” Edgar Allan Poe’s position in American literary history and H.L. Mencken’s role as a literary critic and an “artist of destruction” who cleared the way and created an audience for the major American writers of the twenties are dealt with in other essays. The collection includes imaginative studies of Henry James, Mark Twain, Edmund Wilson, and Karl Shapiro. Several Southern writers, including Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, and James Branch Cabell, also come under Rubin’s scrutiny.

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324

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807124702

ISBN 13

9780807124703

My Father's People

A Family of Southern Jews

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

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My Father's People

A Family of Southern Jews

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

Louis Rubin's people on his father's side were odd, inscrutable, and remarkable. In contrast to his mother's family, who were "normal, good people devoid of mystery," the ways of the Rubins both puzzled and attracted him. In My Father's People, Rubin tells "as best I can about them all -- my father, his three brothers, and his three sisters." It is a searching, sensitive story of Americanization, assimilation, and the displacement -- and survival -- of a religious heritage. Born between 1888 and 1902 in Charleston, South Carolina, their father an immigrant Russian Jew, the Rubin children suffered dire poverty, humiliation, and separation when their parents became incapacitated. Three of the boys were sent to the Hebrew Orphans' Home in Atlanta for several years. Yet the sons all managed to build long, productive, even notable lives and livelihoods, becoming, variously, a newspaper editor, Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, businessman, and -- in the case of Rubin's father -- a far-famed long-range weather prognosticator. Private people, reticent to discuss their painful early years, the Rubins were not easily knowable. Still, the author draws a strikingly candid portrait of each, using memories, stories, keen insight, and broad empathy -- fascinating character studies full of individual propensities and peculiarities that together reveal the wider family resemblance. Although the Rubins were mostly nonreligious as adults, their family's rabbinical tradition and their experience as southern Jews were key to their vocational fervor and the lives they made for themselves. "They were Americans, and they were Jews," Rubin concludes. "These were enough." Told with Louis Rubin's signature eloquence and wit, My Father's People is a testimony to the courage of immigrant southern Jews and their gifts to their chosen country.

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159

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LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807153532

ISBN 13

9780807153536

The Edge of the Swamp

A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

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The Edge of the Swamp

A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers from creating transcendent works of art. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his informal inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on the lives and works of three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod. In a close and highly original reading of Poe's poetry and fiction, Rubin shows just how profoundly growing up in Richmond, Virginia, influenced that writer. The sole author of the Old South whose work has endured did not use southern settings or concern himself with his region's history or politics. Poe was, according to Rubin, in active rebellion against the middle-class community of Richmond and its materialistic values. Simms, on the other hand, aspired to the plantation society ideal of his native Charleston, South Carolina. He was not the most devoted and energetic of southern writers and one of the country's best-known and most respected literary figures before the Civil War. Rubin finds an explanation for much of the lost promise of antebellum southern literature in Simms's career. Here was a talented man who got caught up in the politically obsessed plantation community of Charleston, becoming an apologist for the system and an ardent defender of slavery. Timrod, also a Charlestonian native, was a highly gifted poet whose work attained the stature of literature when the Civil War gave him a theme. He was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. Only when his region was locked in a desperate military struggle for the right to exist did he suddenly find his enduring voice. Anyone interested in southern life and literature will welcome his provocative and engaging new look at southern writing from one of the region's most perceptive critics.

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Page Count

269

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807153648

ISBN 13

9780807153642

The Wary Fugitives

Four Poets

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

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The Wary Fugitives

Four Poets

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren—each began his career as one of the coterie of southern poets centered at Vanderbilt University who attracted national attention with their publication of The Fugitive magazine in the early 1920s and the celebrated essays in I’ll Take My Stand. Collectively known as the Fugitives (or Agrarians as they were later called) they became ardent and influential participants in the regionalist-proletarian literary controversies of the Depression decades. Each of the four poets was personally concerned with the connection between their creative work and the social realities around them. In The Wary Fugitives Louis Rubin masterfully explores and illustrates the relationships between their poetry, novels, and literary criticism, and their work as social critics. He conducts, in the process, a revealing and provocative inquiry into the connection between American history and the twentieth-century South.

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Page Count

408

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

080710454X

ISBN 13

9780807104545

Small Craft Advisory

A Book About the Building of a Boat

By: Louis D. Rubin

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Small Craft Advisory

A Book About the Building of a Boat

By: Louis D. Rubin

“Even readers who deem themselves confirmed landlubbers will warm to this charming memoir...[also] offers the fine local color of coastal North Carolina.”—Publishers Weekly When Louis Rubin was thirteen, he built a leaky little boat and paddled it out to the edge of the ship channel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he felt the inexorable pull of the water. In his sixties, dozens of boats later—sailboats, powerboats, inboards and outboards—the pull is as strong as ever. In the tradition established by Twain, Conrad, and Melville, Small Craft Advisory explores man’s longtime passion for boats. Louis Rubin examines the compulsion that has prompted him and countless other non-nautical persons to spend so much time, and no small portion of their incomes, on watercraft that they can use only infrequently. As his new boat (a cabin cruiser made of wood on a workboat hull) is being built, Rubin tells of his past boats and numerous boating disasters, and draws a poignant comparison between his two passions: watercraft and the craft of writing. “A wistful meditation on risk-taking and a longing for a place where time never runs out.”—The Washington Post Book World “If the point of reading a memoir is to meet a person who is truly good company, and maybe to have a little wisdom rub off at the same time, Small Craft Advisory is a book to read.”—The New York Times Book Review “In describing the building of his boat he is describing the building of his life, reasserting the shaping value of memory and imagination. [A] gracefully written contemplation.”—Library Journal

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Page Count

311

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802196713

ISBN 13

9780802196712

Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston

Sketches and Stories

By: Louis D. Rubin

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Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston

Sketches and Stories

By: Louis D. Rubin

A series of semi-autobiographical sketches and stories detailing life in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1930s and ‘40s. Growing up in Charleston in the 1930s and 1940s, accomplished storyteller Louis Rubin witnessed the subtle gradations of caste and class among neighborhoods, from south of Broad Street where established families and traditional mores held sway, to the various enclaves of Uptown, in which middle-class and blue-collar families went about their own diverse lives and routines. In Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston, Rubin draws on autobiography and imagination in briskly paced renderings of his native Charleston that capture the atmosphere of the Holy City during an era when the population had not yet swelled above sixty-five thousand. Rubin’s wide-eyed narrator takes readers on excursions to Adger’s Wharf, the Battery, Union Terminal, the shops of King Street, the Majestic Theater, the College of Charleston, and other recognizable landmarks. With youthful glee he watches the barges and shrimp trawlers along the waterfront, rides streetcars down Rutledge Avenue and trains to Savannah and Richmond, paddles the Ashley River in a leaky homemade boat, pitches left-handed for the youngest team in the Twilight Baseball League, ponders the curious chanting coming from the Jewish Community Center, and catches magical glimpses of the Morris Island lighthouse from atop the Folly Beach Ferris wheel. His fascination with the gas-electric Boll Weevil train epitomizes his appreciation for the freedom of movement between the worlds of Uptown and Downtown that defines his youth in Charleston. This collection ends with a homecoming to Charleston by our narrator, then a young man in his early twenties, as his inbound train is greeted by familiar vistas of the city as well as by views he had never encountered before. This is the city Rubin called home, where there were always surprising discoveries to be found both in the burgeoning newness of Uptown and the storied legacies of Downtown. “Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston is about a city in some ways larger that the state in which it resides. The book is also about memory and boyhood and baseball and boats and trains and family—and it packs a great wallop because it’s written by one of the country’s finest writers. These nine stories are among the best nine innings of history you’ll ever read.” —Clyde Edgerton “Louis Rubin brings the city to life with his insider guide to a secret Charleston too often overlooked in the carriage tours and guidebooks of today. Rubin allows you to enter the soul of the real Charleston, revealing its essence and depth. A wonderful, necessary book.” —Pat Conroy, author of South of Broad

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153

Publisher

Univ of South Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1611172683

ISBN 13

9781611172683

The Sectoral Trade Losses from Financial Crises

By: Jean-Marc B. Atsebi,Jean-Louis Combes,Alexandru Minea

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The Sectoral Trade Losses from Financial Crises

By: Jean-Marc B. Atsebi,Jean-Louis Combes,Alexandru Minea

The “Great Trade Collapse” triggered by the 2008-09 crisis calls for a careful assessment of the trade losses from financial crises. We adopt a more detailed perspective by looking at the response of different types of trade (i.e. agricultural, mining, and manufactured goods, and services) following various types of financial crises (i.e. debt, banking, and currency crises). Estimations performed on the 1980-2018 period using a combination of impact assessment and local projections to capture a causal dynamic effect running from financial crises to the trade activity show that the collapse of total trade is long-lasting and mainly driven by the fall of manufacturing and to some extent services trade. These causal effects are found to operate through three channels: a structural, a demand-side, and a supply-side channel. By contributing to the understanding of the trade effects of financial crises, our analysis provides insightful support for the design and implementation of policies aimed at coping with these effects.

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International Monetary Fund

Published Date

ISBN 10

1513586734

ISBN 13

9781513586731

The Golden Weather

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

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The Golden Weather

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

Louis D. Rubin's first novel paints in golden light the spring and summer of a boy's thirteenth year in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1936. Rubin catches not only the passage from childhood to adolescence - and its attendant woes and triumphs - but also the streets, sounds, sights, and people of his native city in an era now past but made luminous in the language of time revisited. During the long, hot summer of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, Omar Kohn experiences his first love, builds a boat, learns how not to write poetry, and begins to see the flaws in his boyhood heroes. Along his journey to summer's end we meet vivid characters: the Marvelous Ringgold, streetcar motorist extraordinaire; Omar's mischievous best friend, Billy Cartwright; the rabbi and Omar's fellow pupils at Sabbath School; the black maid and yardman, Viola and Dominique; Dr. Horatio Chisholm, poet and extoller of local glories and pieties; and aged ex-ferryboat captain Major William Izard Frampton, C.S.A., whose wartime exploits don't quite match up with documented history. There is also Helen, from Philadelphia, in whose company Omar learns to question various assumptions about his world.

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Page Count

324

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

080712009X

ISBN 13

9780807120095

A Memory of Trains

The Boll Weevil and Others

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

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A Memory of Trains

The Boll Weevil and Others

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

The author, a literary critic and historian, uses over 100 of his own photographs to recall his life-long love of trains.

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224

Publisher

Univ of South Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

157003382X

ISBN 13

9781570033827

The Summer the Archduke Died

Essays on Wars and Warriors

By: Louis Decimus Rubin

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The Summer the Archduke Died

Essays on Wars and Warriors

By: Louis Decimus Rubin

Writer and literary scholar Rubin turns his thoughts to World War I and its aftermath, a subject of lifelong fascination for him. Topics range from tactics used at the naval battle of Jutland, to critiques of revisionist histories of Winston Churchill, to the war's impact on literature"--Provided by publisher.

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Page Count

184

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826266649

ISBN 13

9780826266644

Surfaces of a Diamond

A Novel

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

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Surfaces of a Diamond

A Novel

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

Fictional character Omar Kohn recalls his fifteenth summer. Story set in Charleston, S.C., in the late 1930s.

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Page Count

220

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807129682

ISBN 13

9780807129685

The Heat of the Sun

A Novel

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

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The Heat of the Sun

A Novel

By: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)

With perfect pitch and an unerring eye for detail, Rubin transports readers to Charleston, South Carolina, 1940, in a riveting tale of romance and mystery. When a rookie newspaper reporter comes to Charleston to be near his fiance, he discovers a shocking truth about her past and her father's sordid business deals.

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Page Count

452

Published Date

ISBN 10

1563522330

ISBN 13

9781563522338

The Curious Death of the Novel

Essays in American Literature

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

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The Curious Death of the Novel

Essays in American Literature

By: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

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324

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LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807124702

ISBN 13

9780807124703

The Summer the Archduke Died

Essays on Wars and Warriors

By: Louis Decimus Rubin

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The Summer the Archduke Died

Essays on Wars and Warriors

By: Louis Decimus Rubin

When World War II erupted, fifteen-year-old Louis Rubin pedaled his bike down to the Charleston harbor to see whether a German freighter might have come there to escape British warships, as had occurred in 1914. Although he went home disappointed, young Louis never lost his fascination with matters military." "The Summer the Archduke Died offers essays, beginning with the outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 and covering events of subsequent years, that examine historical issues in a fresh way. These essays take in a panoramic view of German militarism, the American role in the war, and British and American politics and politicos. They convey the impact of the war on writers and include a critical review of Theodore Roosevelt's life and legacy." "Ranging from the outbreak of the Great War to "A Certain Day in 1939" when European peace was shattered once more, Rubin's lively pieces are rendered with the literary craftsmanship for which he is renowned. The Summer the Archduke Died will appeal to aficionados of history and fine writing alike."--BOOK JACKET.

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