Bøker av John Dizikes

Poetry was a form of liberation. The all-engrossing subject was love.Love Songs is a collective biography of nine American women poets who lived and wrote, primarily, in the first half of the twentieth century and were important in the emergence of New York City as the literary capital of the nation. They knew one another, and sometimes reviewed, criticized, and encouraged each other's work. The poems presented here are lyric poems, short song-like poems of many moods and forms, on many varied subjects - relationships, urban life, modernism and traditionalism, contemporary politics, and, above John Dizikes all, the infinite varieties of love.Léonie Adams subtly explored the metaphysics of contemporary love.Louise Bogan, a wide-ranging observer of the contemporary scene, was influential as poetry editor of The New Yorker.Amy Lowell, a pioneer of free verse and Modernist Imagism, was a prolific essayist and reviewer, and a biographer of Keats.Edna St. Vincent Millay, a compelling performer and a cultural force, was America's most-read poet.Marianne Moore, unconventional in every regard, was an incomparable Modernist, her poetry unique in point of view and style.Genevieve Taggard, an editor and an early champion of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, explored radicalism and contemporary politics in her own work.Millay, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, and Dorothy Parker were popular to a degree which seems extraordinary now. Their work was widely quoted, printed and reprinted in newspapers and journals, and performed for large audiences both live and via radio.Varied and independent, all were triumphantly successful in the courage with which they wrote.

This text tells how opera, steeped in European aristocratic tradition, was transplanted into the democratic cultural enviroment of America. It includes vignettes of productions, personalities, audiences and theatres throughout the country from 1735 to the present day.

In the 1890s, feisty Tod Sloan (18741933) abandoned the centuries-old jockey tradition of riding in a straight sitting position and instead crouched low on the neck of his horse. The result was not only a string of victories for young Sloan but also a revolution in horse racing. In this entertaining book, award-winning author John Dizikes recounts the remarkable story of the Indiana boy who rose from obscurity to become the most famous jockey in the United States and Great Britain at the turn of the century. Dizikes evokes the turbulent, colorful world of horse racing and gambling in which Tod Sloan rocketed to celebrityand from which he was just as dramatically ejected.Sloans innovative riding style helped to transform horse racing into the first nationally popular spectator sport, drawing in huge crowds and vast amounts of betting money. But Sloans career was crushingly ended by those who resented and envied him. A dandy, a big spender, a man whose company women loved, Sloan related to horses in an almost magical way, yet foundered in his dealings with people. This book is the biography of a diminutive man who lived in large style, and lives on in George M. Cohans musical Little Johnny Jones and Ernest Hemingways short story My Old Man. The book is also much morea fascinating cultural history that illuminates the history of horse racing and betting, the democratization of sport, changing conceptions of masculinity, the hypocrisy of Victorian morality, the lionizing and demonizing of celebrities, and a variety of other inviting topics.

The gradual transformation of the aristocratic sporting tradition of Britain into a popular one in America is the theme of this work. Dizikes examines the self-contradicting attitudes of 19th-century Americans in the process of creating a uniquely American sporting culture.