Historian, novelist, and masterful teacher Richard Marius struggled with religious belief throughout his life. His very devout mother taught him to memorize the Bible from a very early age and influenced him to make a commitment to enter the ministry when he was a senior in high school. However, during his first year at the University of Tennessee, his faith was shaken by a reading assignment in freshman English-an essay in which the author argues that the universe is purposeless and meaningless. After receiving a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Marius attended graduate school at Yale University to study Renaissance and Reformation history, receiving a PhD in history with adissertation on Sir Thomas More. During his years as a student, he occasionally held the position of supply pastor, but, after graduation from Yale, he decided to enter the academic world as a history professor. And he continued to preach when the opportunity arose. Wrestling with God is a collection of twenty-three sermons or meditations, delivered in a variety of settings, and spanning Richard Marius's adult life from the late 1950s until a few months before his death. Many of them were delivered at Morning Prayers, a daily service in the Appleton Chapel of the Memorial Church at Harvard University. In these selections, he explores the questions of faith and doubt, belief and unbelief, good and evil. His explications are informed by an eclectic knowledge of the Bible, art and architecture, music, literature, history, philosophy and theology, politics and current events, travel, and languages. A skeptical humanist, Marius nevertheless was infused with his own kind of religious feeling, and his struggle to find meaning and purpose in his life will resonate with all readers who struggle with the ultimate questions of existence.
Most previous biographers of Thomas More have sought to prove him a saint; in this, the first full-scale biography of More in half a century, Richard Marius, a leading Reformation historian, seeks to restore the man. More’s life spanned a tumultuous period in Western history. He was born in 1478 into a society still medieval in its customs and laws. But by the time of his death in 1535 England was already shaken to its depths by the powerful and unsettling ideas of the Renaissance. Marius draws upon important recent research and his profound knowledge of More’s own voluminous writing to make a coherent whole of the life and work of the immensely complex man who was both a product of the times and a singular figure in them. He gives us More the boy—his London childhood, he deep respect for his father, who rose from a tradesman’s background to become a judge of the highest court in the land (a “council of fathers” was to rule More’s kingdom of Utopia) . . . More the youth—sent at about age twelve to serve in the household of the powerful and political Bishop Morton, later struggling to choose between the priesthood and the lures of secular life: marriage and a career in the great world… More the Londoner, the city man—lawyer, graduate of the Inns of Court, member of the rising middle class with its drive for an achievement and position. We see More the humanist man of letter as Marius treats in full his friendship with Erasmus; his now controversial History of Richard III, from which Shakespeare’s Richard derives; and the originals and meanings of his most famous work, Utopia. More the family man is reveal in his relationship with his father, his two wives, and his children as far more complex than the sanctified image of legend. Marius explore More’s public career as Lord Chancellor, as champion of the Catholic church, and finally as martyr to the old faith. He shows us a man who, although he hated and feared tyrants, always believes that authority as a source of order was necessary to the public good—a man who as royal councilor and Lord Chancellor upheld his king until the very moment when, in response to Henry’s final tyranny, he chose “to die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Marius also demonstrates that it was the centuries-old authority of the Catholic Church that More revered; that he was as suspicious of paper supremacy as of any tyranny. The man Marius ultimately reveals is one more passionate and driven (in his family life, his convictions, his persecution of heretics) than the serene hero of A Man For All Seasons. But he is also a man possessed of such wit, integrity and charm that he was loved not only by his family but by almost everyone who knew him. It is the special triumph of this biography that with its rare combination of impeccable scholarship and narrative power, we are brought into the presence of a whole person with all his flaws and virtues, and that by the time More meets his death, he has become familiar and important to us not merely as a historical figure but also as a human being.
In this powerful novel—the capstone to Richard Marius’s illustrious career—a gripping double murder propels the small, Bible-obsessed town of Bourbonville, Tennessee, into connection with the wider society opening up in the years following World War II. At the center: Charles Alexander, twenty, groomed from birth by his mother to be a Baptist minister, teetering on the edge of his faith. In his last year of college, working late one night at the newspaper office, he accidentally witnesses the murders. The killer is Hope Kirby, World War II hero, member of a large mountain clan of farmers, who has discovered his wife’s infidelity. Although Kirby’s code of honor requires that he exact vengeance, it won’t allow him to kill an innocent bystander, and Charles goes free, promising not to tell what he’s seen. But Charles does tell, and we watch, fascinated, as a trial, an appeal, and a new terror unleashed on the countryside draw the entire county into the action. Among the people most closely involved: the skillful, overweight, hard-drinking lawyer for the defense; two Baptist preachers—one liberal, one a strict constructionist—each with a secret to hide; a lady banker determinedly headed for trouble; a big-hearted good- old-boy sheriff; Charles’s disturbingly freewheeling, freethinking sometime college girlfriend. Most importantly, we see the Kirby clan: Pappy, whose extraordinary patience, hard work, and self-reliance cause his hardscrabble farm to prosper until he’s turned out by the coming of a national park; and the five Kirby sons, who are trying hard to make a new place for themselves in the town. As these and others play their parts in the affair of honor, we see Charles and the Kirbys begin to reexamine their dramatically opposing but equally encapsulated ways of viewing life—fundamentalist Christian and ancient “code of the hills.” And as the novel draws to its climactic and satisfying close, we see them—and finally the entire town—profoundly, permanently changed.
In his third and most powerful work of fiction, the acclaimed author of The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land—biographer also of Thomas More—immerses us in the rich life of an American town, in the subtle and complex experience of becoming an American, in the good and evil of a time gone by. The place is Bourbonville, Tennessee. The time: the end of the First World War. The protagonist: Paul Alexander—Greek by birth, Belgian by adoption, wounded in the war, nearly to death, and now washed up history, by accident, by odd fate, on the edges of Bourbonville, and soon to become part of its center. This is a town where people have known one another for generations, a town full of talkers, compulsive storytellers—thrilled to have a new listener to whom they can pour out local scandals, triumphs, secrets, especially the ongoing saga of the great schism between Moreland Pinkerton, champion of Progress who has drained a swamp to a foundry, and Brian Ledbetter and his Weaver stepsons, independent farmers with the values of an earlier, more agrarian America, who see Pinkerton as a bully and a destroyer. Listening, fascinated, Paul is reluctantly drawn into the life of the town, into the world beyond Mrs. Coolidge’s where he boards, one of seven bachelors. And—through both his work and his friendships—into the battle between Pinkerton (his boss at the foundry) and Ledbetter (whose granddaughter loves him) for the town’s soul. Inevitably, the two factions find themselves in dangerous confrontation where a black war veteran’s attempt to organize the foundry’s black workers erupts into racial animosities and bloody industrial conflict. And, in the midst of these violent events, Paul’s own astonishing story—his exile from Greece and his wartime ordeal—unfolds as he begins to move away from his past into the heart of the town, finding himself eventually part even of its myths. In After the War, Marius has given us a large and moving novel that compels us both by its panoramic amplitude and by its revelation of one fascinating life in the throes of change.
Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Luther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a figure as truly as this robust and eloquent life of Luther. A highly regarded historian and biographer and a gifted novelist and playwright, Richard Marius gives us a dazzling portrait of the German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to define the Reformation. Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his flight to an Augustinian monastery and ordination to the outbreak of his revolt against Rome in 1517, the Wittenberg years, his progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg, and his triumphant return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acquaint us with pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, the theology of penance, the timing of Luther's Reformation breakthrough, the German peasantry in 1525, Muntzer's revolutionaries, the whys and hows of Luther's attack on Erasmus. In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism and whose titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for the development of the modern religious consciousness of the West. In all of this, he also represents tragedy, with the goodness of his works overmatched by their calamitous effects on religion and society.
Reading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels is a collection of lectures by Harvard University professor and nationally known novelist and biographer Richard Marius. Marius had been charged with the task of teaching an introductory course on Faulkner to undergraduates in 1996 and 1997. Combining his love of Faulkner's writing with his own experiences as an author and teacher, Marius produced a series of delightful lectures-which stand on their own as sparkling, well-rounded essays-that help beginning students in understanding the sometimes difficult work of this celebrated literary master. An expository treatment of Faulkner's major works, Reading Faulkner comprises essays that are arranged in roughly chronological order, corresponding to Faulkner's development as a writer. In a way sure to captivate the imagination of a new reader of Faulkner, Marius explicates themes in Faulkner's work, and he sheds light on the larger social history that marked Faulkner's literary production. In addition, Marius is a southerner who grew up a couple of generations after Faulkner and, like Faulkner, turned his own world into the setting for his fiction. This unique perspective, combined with Marius's thorough readings of the novels, grounded in basic Faulkner criticism, provides an engaging and accessible self-guided tour through Faulkner's career. Reading Faulkner is perfect for students from high school through the undergraduate level and will be enjoyed by general readers as well. Richard Marius (1933-1999) taught at the University of Tennessee before heading Harvard's expository writing program from 1978 to 1998. He was the author of Thomas More, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death, and four novels about his native East Tennessee. Nancy Grisham Anderson is an associate professor of English at Auburn University, Montgomery. She is the author of The Writer's Audience: A Reader for Composition and the editor of They Call Me Kay: A Courtship in Letters, and Wrestling with God: The Meditations of Richard Marius. She was a longtime friend of Richard Marius.
Poetry, prose, photos, and songs of the Civil War. The authors range from hawks to doves. In the former category, James Madison Bell wrote: "The pleasing duty still remains / To sing a people from their chains.
When Philippe-Richard Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti’s Founders indeed first defeated native Africans’ armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation. Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations. Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.
with the contradictions such praise imposes on a towering figure. In Richard Marius's authoritative and engaging portrait, Sir Thomas More, the martyr and brilliant public figure, is a lesson for our season.
This text helps students get beyond merely compiling dates and facts; it teaches them how to incorporate their own ideas into their papers and to tell a story about history that interests them and their peers. Covering brief essays and the documented resource paper, the text explores the writing and researching processes, different modes of historical writing (including argument), and offers guidelines for improving style as well as documenting sources. --From publisher's description.
Though he may not have realised it, Gaius Marius caused through his political ambition the beginnings of the fall of the Roman Republic. Presenting this view, Evans traces here Marius' rise to pre-eminence, his contribution to legislation and his involvement with other politicians. It was other politicians, this work argues, that emulated or even exceeded a dangerous precedent Marius had set.
A Short Guide to Writing about History is an ideal complement for any history course intended to teach students to think and write like historians. This engaging and practical text will teach students how to go beyond reporting the basic dates and facts of their history books and show them how to infuse their writing with their own ideas and unique perspective. Covering brief essays and the documented resource paper, the text explores the writing and researching processes, different modes of historical writing (including argument), and offers guidelines for improving style as well as documenting sources.
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