The Reader in the Dickens World: Style and Response

Literature & Fiction

Horton, Susan R.

Genre Fiction

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

There's no shortage of biographies of the bankers and the titans of industry like J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers who made great fortunes during our last Gilded Age. There's also no shortage of biographies of the seven Presidents who led the country during those years that led up to the Great Depression. But what were the effects of the policies devised and put in place by those presidents and titans of industry on ordinary American workers? From Green Fields to Blue Collars suggests some answers to that question. It does so not by talking about "the working class" in the aggregate, but by offering an up-close and fine-grained history of just four working class families living in Ohio and Michigan, all immigrants or the children of immigrants. Each of their lives was playing out during economically turbulent years much like our present moment: a time of great income inequality. Like millions of other everyday American workers, they were trying as best they knew how to accommodate the transition from an agricultural to an industrial base, as we transition now from an industrial to a technological one. Which laws and policies helped ordinary Americans like them during those times, and which didn't? Which of their decisions, attitudes, strategies, and habits helped carry them through, and which didn't? Which of their attitudes, including their deep ambivalence about those in positions of power, were carried down the line, possibly even epigenetically, to their descendants? What might we learn, both individually and as a country, by looking closely at the decisions they made? Those questions should be of interest to anyone interested in the history of farming, of industrial production in Ohio and Michigan, in labor history, in the uses of genealogical research, and even to those interested in the most recent findings in genetics.

From Green Fields to Blue Collars: Resistance and Persistence in Four Ohio and Michigan Families, 1870-1930

History

Americas

susan horton

Poet William Carlos Williams proclaimed "No ideas but in things." Ideas also reside in the people who use those "things" and the places where they use them. Factory worker's daughter, secretary, army wife, 'divorcee, ' teacher, professor, single mom, step-mom, bereaved parent, activist, volunteer, solitary beach walker, Susan Horton is no tourist. She has lived, worked, taught, researched, written, or lectured in Defiance, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; in Honolulu, in London, Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and on Cape Cod. Still using Gregg shorthand and climbing ladders-real, not figurative-seeing each place, person, or thing as an affable ambusher, ambling up to remind us of where we come from, who we were back then, offering up some answers to David Byrne's 'eighties question: "How did I get here?" Manual Labor, Maximal Love is Susan R. Horton's seventh book. All are available on Amazon, including on her Author Page there. Her two most recent are also available through Barnes and Noble and ALibris.

Manual Labor, Maximal Love

Poetry

Thinking Through Writing

Many writers, even experienced ones, admit that one of the most frightening objects in their world is a blank piece of paper. Susan Horton feels that too many teachers, students, and writers themselves make writing harder than it needs to be. So much emphasis is placed on form and grammar―the "rules of the game," so to speak―that the essence of the writing process, the sheer joy of saying something new, is lost.
Thinking Through Writing is, in Horton's words, "a 'Back-to-Basics' book"―but one with a twist. "I'm talking about the real basics," she says. "Not grammar, but basics like what writing is and is for, how you get an idea, and how and why each idea demands its own kind of organization, and how ideas turn into essays, and, even more basic, about how your mind forms ideas in the first place. You can use this book with or without a teacher in front of you. It is put together not to tell you what to do or how to write as much as it is designed to set things up so you can discover for yourself how writing works (yours and everybody else's), and, in the process, how your mind works as well. It's a kind of 'watch yourself think' book. There aren't many answers in it, but there are lots of questions: lots of things to try to explore and discover and play with. Even more than that, this is a book that tries to teach you not just how to answer questions, but how to find questions to ask."
As a writer and teacher of writing for more than a decade, Horton knows firsthand the anxieties, frustrations, challenges, and rewards that are an integral part of that exciting craft. She also has extraordinary insight into the writing process itself, and it is that insight that she attempts to communicate in Thinking Through Writing.
Sharp declines in standardized composition test scores and classroom performance during the past decade have created a "literacy panic" among educators and parents alike. As a result, composition is gaining a new prominence as an academic discipline. Horton's approach to the subject, emphasizing understanding oneself and one's craft rather than fear of error, is distinctive, original, and most of all, effective. Anyone who wants to learn how to write, how to think, and how thinking and writing are related will want to read this book.

Johns Hopkins University Press

Book is used and has been withdrawn from service from a Library. Book has a Library Binding and the usual Library Stamps, Stickers, Card Holder, Library Markings. May or May Not have a Dust Jacket.

History & Criticism

Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

&ldquo;Live in the layers,&rdquo; Stanley Kunitz insisted in one of his best-loved poems. This collection of poetry by Susan Horton does just that, layering poems of water-bug, surface-skimming playfulness and high-wire word play with poems that dive deep and are, at bedrock, meditations on loss survived and humor revived. Add to this the wit of Billy Collins, the eye of a nature poet, and a smidgen of the snarkiness of Philip Larkin lurking at the edges, and you have Mapless in Dream City

Mapless in Dream City

Small Batch Books

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Books by Horton, Susan R.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Horton, Susan R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Reader in the Dickens World: Style and Response

From Green Fields to Blue Collars: Resistance and Persistence in Four Ohio and Michigan Families, 1870-1930

Manual Labor, Maximal Love

Thinking Through Writing

The Reader in the Dickens World: Style and Response

Mapless in Dream City