William Wharton's Books

Ever After

A Father's True Story

By: William Wharton

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Ever After

A Father's True Story

By: William Wharton

In August of 1988, heavy black smoke engulfed an Oregon highway, causing a massive 23-car pileup that claimed the lives of novelist William Wharton's 36-year-old daughter, her husband, and their two infant daughters. They'd been victims of field burning, a routine agricultural practice, and were burned alive in their van. How could such a thing happen? And how could a father come to terms with such a loss? Ever After, Wharton's first memoir, is his search for answers to these questions, written with the inspired simplicity that won him great acclaim for his novels.

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Page Count

192

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062278347

ISBN 13

9780062278340

Houseboat on the Seine

A Memoir

By: William Wharton

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Houseboat on the Seine

A Memoir

By: William Wharton

The title brings to mind a luxury vessel on the most glamorous river in the world, but readers expecting to learn about the high life in France will be in for a surprise. In this charming memoir, painter and novelist Wharton (Birdy) instead gives us literally the nuts and bolts of building a houseboat, along with generous dollops of humor and local color. As a struggling artist in Paris with his schoolteacher wife and four children, Wharton decided to build his own boat after visiting that of an acquaintance in the mid-1970s. He recounts the family's adventures in making their dream come true. They gave up their Paris flat and moved onto the boat, which docked 12 miles downriver from Paris at Le Port Marly. There they spent the next 25 years adding the finishing touches. The most poignant moment comes at the wedding of oldest child, Kate, aboard ship. The author reminds us that she, her husband and their two children were to perish in 1988 in an Oregon fire, a tragedy he recounted in Ever After. Some readers might have preferred learning more about life aboard the boat than about the details of building it, but this work will satisfy Wharton devotees and Francophiles alike.

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Page Count

249

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062278355

ISBN 13

9780062278357

A Midnight Clear

A Novel

By: William Wharton

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A Midnight Clear

A Novel

By: William Wharton

Set in the Ardennes Forest on Christmas Eve 1944, Sergeant Will Knott and five other GIs are ordered close to the German lines to establish an observation post in an abandoned chateau. Here they play at being soldiers in what seems to be complete isolation. That is, until the Germans begin revealing their whereabouts and leaving signs of their presence: a scarecrow, equipment the squad had dropped on a retreat from a reconnaissance mission and, strangest of all, a small fir tree hung with fruit, candles, and cardboard stars. Suddenly, Knott and the others must unravel these mysteries, learning as they do about themselves, about one another, and about the "enemy," until A Midnight Clear reaches its unexpected climax, one of the most shattering in the literature of war.

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Page Count

229

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

1557049904

ISBN 13

9781557049902

Speculators in Empire

Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix

By: William J Campbell

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Speculators in Empire

Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix

By: William J Campbell

At the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the British secured the largest land cession in colonial North America. Crown representatives gained possession of an area claimed but not occupied by the Iroquois that encompassed parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The Iroquois, however, were far from naïve—and the outcome was not an instance of their simply being dispossessed by Europeans. In Speculators in Empire, William J. Campbell examines the diplomacy, land speculation, and empire building that led up to the treaty. His detailed study overturns common assumptions about the roles of the Iroquois and British on the eve of the American Revolution. Through the treaty, the Iroquois directed the expansion of empire in order to serve their own needs while Crown negotiators obtained more territory than they were authorized to accept. How did this questionable transfer happen, who benefited, and at what cost? Campbell unravels complex intercultural negotiations in which colonial officials, land speculators, traders, tribes, and individual Indians pursued a variety of agendas, each side possessing considerable understanding of the other’s expectations and intentions. Historians have credited British Indian superintendent Sir William Johnson with pulling off the land grab, but Campbell shows that Johnson was only one of many players. Johnson’s deputy, George Croghan, used the treaty to capitalize on a lifetime of scheming and speculation. Iroquois leaders and their peoples also benefited substantially. With keen awareness of the workings of the English legal system, they gained protection for their homelands by opening the Ohio country to settlement. Campbell’s navigation of the complexities of Native and British politics and land speculation illuminates a time when regional concerns and personal politicking would have lasting consequences for the continent. As Speculators in Empire shows, colonial and Native history are unavoidably entwined, and even interdependent.

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Page Count

358

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806147105

ISBN 13

9780806147109

Write Like the Masters

Emulating the Best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and Others

By: William Cane

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Write Like the Masters

Emulating the Best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and Others

By: William Cane

Want To Find Your Voice? Learn from the Best. Time and time again you've been told to find your own unique writing style, as if it were as simple as pulling it out of thin air. But finding your voice isn't easy, so where better to look than to the greatest writers of our time? Write Like the Masters analyzes the writing styles of twenty-one great novelists, including Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Franz Kafka, Flannery O'Connor, and Ray Bradbury. This fascinating and insightful guide shows you how to imitate the masters of literature and, in the process, learn advanced writing secrets to fire up your own work. You'll discover: • Herman Melville's secrets for creating characters as memorable as Captain Ahab • How to master point of view with techniques from Fyodor Dostoevesky • Ways to pick up the pace by keeping your sentences lean like Ernest Hemingway • The importance of sensual details from James Bond creator Ian Fleming • How to add suspense to your story by following the lead of the master of horror, Stephen King Whether you're working on a unique voice for your next novel or you're a composition student toying with different styles, this guide will help you gain insight into the work of the masters through the rhetorical technique of imitation. Filled with practical, easy-to-apply advice, Write Like the Masters is your key to understanding and using the proven techniques of history's greatest authors.

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Page Count

227

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1599633698

ISBN 13

9781599633695

Reconstituting Authority

American Fiction in the Province of the Law, 1880-1920

By: William E. Moddelmog

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Reconstituting Authority

American Fiction in the Province of the Law, 1880-1920

By: William E. Moddelmog

In Reconstituting Authority, William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority. Moddelmog does not assume a sharp distinction between literary and legal institutions and practices but shows how writers imagined the two fields as engaged in the same cultural process. He argues that because the law was instrumental in setting the terms by which concepts such as race, gender, nationhood, ownership, and citizenship were defined in the nineteenth century, authors challenging those definitions had to engage the law on its own terrain: to place their work in a dialogue with the law by telling stories that were already authorized (though perhaps suppressed) by legal institutions. The first half of the book is devoted in separate chapters to William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Pauline Hopkins. The focus shifts from large theoretical concerns to questions of contract and native sovereignty, to issues of African American citizenship and racial entitlement. In each case the discussion is rooted in a larger consideration of the rule (or misrule) of law. The second half of the book turns from the rule of law to the issue of property, specifically the Lockean version of the self that tied identity to legal conceptions of property and economic value. In separate discussions of Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, Reconstituting Authority reveals authors as closely engaged with those changing perspectives on property and identity, in ways that challenged the racial, gendered, and economic consequences of America's possessive individualism.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1587293374

ISBN 13

9781587293375

Questionable Charity

Gender, Humanitarianism, and Complicity in U.S. Literary Realism

By: William M. Morgan

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Questionable Charity

Gender, Humanitarianism, and Complicity in U.S. Literary Realism

By: William M. Morgan

A fascinating reevaluation of U.S. literary realism during the Gilded Age.

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Page Count

268

Publisher

UPNE

Published Date

ISBN 10

1584653884

ISBN 13

9781584653882

The Frontier War for American Independence

By: William R. Nester

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The Frontier War for American Independence

By: William R. Nester

The vicious war on the frontier significantly altered the course of the Revolution. Regular troops, volunteers, and Indians clashed in large-scale campaigns. Bloody fights for land, home, and family. Although the American Revolution is commonly associated with specific locations such as the heights above Boston or the frozen Delaware River, important events took place in the wooded, mountainous lands of the frontier.

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Page Count

470

Publisher

Stackpole Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811700771

ISBN 13

9780811700771

Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

By: William Somerset Maugham

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Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

By: William Somerset Maugham

www.delphiclassics.com

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Page Count

3632

Publisher

Delphi Classics

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786560690

ISBN 13

9781786560698

The Supreme Court in the Early Republic

The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth

By: William R. Casto

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The Supreme Court in the Early Republic

The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth

By: William R. Casto

William R. Casto sheds a new light on America's federal judiciary and the changing legal landscape with his detailed examination of the Supreme Court's formative years. In a study that spans the period from the Court's tentative beginnings through the appointment of its third chief justice, Casto reveals a judicial body quite different in orientation and philosophy from the current Supreme Court and one with a legacy of enduring significance for the U.S. legal system. Casto portrays the founding of the Supreme Court as a conscious effort to help the newly established government deal more effectively with national security and foreign policy concerns, and he credits the Court with assisting the Washington and Adams administrations establish stable relationships with Great Britain and France. The initial debate over the Supreme Court's jurisdiction as well as over the method of selecting its justices is recalled here. Casto also reveals the philosophical mindset of the first Supreme Court, contrasting the eighteenth-century concept of natural law with the legal positivism on which the Supreme Court now relies. Using this historical context, he addresses the political controversy over federal common-law crimes, the drafting of the Judiciary Act of 1789, and the adoption of judicial review.

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Page Count

417

Publisher

Univ of South Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1611171695

ISBN 13

9781611171693

Book's by William Wharton

Ever After

Ever After

Houseboat on the Seine

Houseboat on the Seine

A Midnight Clear

A Midnight Clear

Speculators in Empire

Speculators in Empire

Write Like the Masters

Write Like the Masters

Reconstituting Authority

Reconstituting Authority

Questionable Charity

Questionable Charity

The Frontier War for American Independence

The Frontier War for American Independence

Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

The Supreme Court in the Early Republic

The Supreme Court in the Early Republic

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