Elements of Practical Writing: A Guide to Professional Writing

Voss, Ralph F.

Literature & Fiction

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

The Heath Guide to College Writing - annotated teacher's edition.

The Heath guide to college writing

Reference

Keene, Michael L.

Words, Language & Grammar

D.C.Heath and Co

College Writing

D.C. Heath & Co.

The Heath Guide to College Writing

Heath Guide to College Writing

Traces the life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, examines his major works, and suggests the influence of his life on his plays

A Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph

History & Criticism

Univ Pr of Kansas

In the spring of 1973 one of the country's most successful dramatists, William Inge, ran out of reasons to think he was any good. He went into his garage one night and shut the door, seated himself behind the wheel of his new car, and turned the key. By morning he was dead. "Death makes us all innocent," Inge had written, "and weaves all our private hurts and griefs and wrongs into the fabric of time, and makes them a part of eternity." But William Inge had it made, or so it seemed in 1962. He had written an unprecedented string of Broadway hits: Picnic, Bus Stop, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and Come Back, Little Sheba. All four plays had become successful films featuring top Hollywood stars. Inge had received a Pulitzer Prize for Picnic and an Academy Award for his screenplay, Splendor in the Grass. Even his longtime friend and mentor, Tennessee Williams, was envious of his success. Privately, Inge was miserable. His long struggle with alcoholism and profound shame over his homosexuality plagued him before, during, and after his decade of great success. As criticism of his work intensified, Inge responded with increasingly frantic attempts to please by "modernizing" his writing. He abandoned the small-town characters and settings he knew in favor of more lurid, urban subject matter. In the end, his characters lost their authentic voices, and neither critics nor audiences found his later work believable. In this first book-length literary biography of Inge, Ralph Voss peels back the veneer of public success and lays bare the private pain and isolation of the man who was called America's first authentic midwestern playwright. He draws upon interviews, memoirs, and unpublished manuscripts, letters, and papers to show how Inge's unhappy life fueled the struggles his plays depict.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University Press of Kansas

Ralph F. Vosswas a high school junior in Plainville, Kansas in mid-November of 1959 when four members of the Herbert Clutter family were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, by “four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives,” an unimaginable horror in a quiet farm community during the Eisenhower years. No one in Kansas or elsewhere could then have foreseen the emergence of Capote’s book–which has never gone out of print, has twice been made into a major motion picture, remainsrequired reading in criminology, American Studies, sociology, and English classes, and has been the source of two recent biographical films. Voss examines Capote and In Cold Blood from many perspectives, not only as the crowning achievement of Capote’s career, but also as a story in itself, focusing on Capote’s artfully composed text, his extravagant claims for it as reportage, and its larger status in American popular culture. Voss argues that Capote’s publication of In Cold Blood in 1966 forever transcended his reputation as a first-rate stylist but second-rate writer of “Southern gothic” fiction; that In Cold Blood actually is a gothic novel, a sophisticated culmination of Capote’s artistic development and interest in lurid regionalism, but one that nonetheless eclipsed him both personally and artistically. He also explores Capote’s famous claim that he created a genre called the “non-fiction novel,” and its status as a foundational work of “true crime” writing as practiced by authors ranging from Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer to James Ellroy, Joe McGinniss, and John Berendt. Voss also examines Capote’s artful manipulation of the story’s facts and circumstances: his masking of crucial homoerotic elements to enhance its marketability; his need for the killers to remain alive long enough to get the story, and then his need for them to die so that he could complete it; and Capote’s style, his shaping of the narrative, and his selection of details–why it served him to include this and not that, and the effects of such choices―all despite confident declarations that “every word is true.” Though it’s been nearly 50 years since the Clutter murders and far more gruesome crimes have been documented, In Cold Blood continues to resonate deeply in popular culture. Beyond questions of artistic selection and claims of truth, beyond questions about capital punishment and Capote’s own post-publication dissolution, In Cold Blood’s ongoing relevance stems, argues Voss, from its unmatched role as a touchstone for enduring issues of truth, exploitation, victimization, and the power of narrative.

Truman Capote and the Legacy of "In Cold Blood"

University Alabama Press

Readers are well acquainted with Truman Capote’s meteoric rise to fame and his metamorphosis from literary enfant terrible to literary genius, celebrity author, and dispenser of venomously comic witticisms. It is also well-known that he spent his formative years in the south Alabama hamlet of Monroeville, and that he was abandoned there by his mother to be cared for and then to care for elderly relatives. Yet details of those years have remained sketchy and vague. In Monroeville young Capote formed significant bonds and played childhood games with his cousin, Jennings Faulk Carter, and next door neighbor, Nelle Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Go Set a Watchman." Through the tales told by Carter and spun into a fascinating and revealing narrative by Marianne M. Moates readers discover in Truman Capote's Southern Years the lively imagination and the early tragedies of a brilliant child. A new foreword by Ralph F. Voss underscores the enduring relevance of Truman Capote’s work and the influence his Alabama childhood had on his work.

Truman Capote's Southern Years, 25th Anniversary Edition: Stories from a Monroeville Cousin

Moates, Marianne M.

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Books by Voss, Ralph F.