.... As if to reinforce the point, the editorial directors of the DLB announced this year that, ‘‘asked when [the series] will run out of material they reply, ‘‘Never. There are fields that have not yet been touched On the one hand, the assertion is reassuring: the market for reference books remains strong, to judge...

... engagement; they conclude with brief lists of further reading, primary and secondary. Kort’s five-page introduction discusses the challenges of being a woman writer. A Dictionary of Literary Biogra- phy contribution in this neighborhood, American Women Prose Writers, 1870–1920, ed. Sharon M. Harris (DLB...

... experience. Each entry is accompanied by a list of related primary materials in literature, songs, and films. David J. Nordloh 521 Several volumes correlate history and gender. American Women Prose Writers to 1820 (DLB 200), ed. Carla Mulford et al., does the usual thorough DLB job of essay plus bibliography...

... Rawlins series). Missing from its pages, however, are the crime novels of Tony Hillerman and Rudolfo Anaya. Like most volumes in the DLB, American Short-Story Writers since World War II, Third Series, ed. Patrick Meanor and Richard E. Lee (DLB 234), and American Short-Story Writers since World...

... (Carroll), is a DLB documentary volume that reproduces reviews, bits of manuscript, photographs, book jackets, movie posters, interviews, obituaries, and other documents. It should prove to be an excellent teaching tool, and it includes individual chapters on each of the major Beat writers...

... Department toilets and as practical as an old copy of the Sears Roebuck catalogue. The DLB itself is increas- ingly superseded by such online services as the Literary Encyclopedia. Online services, in fact, are rapidly transforming the reference work market. First Search and other online suppliers...

...- dix listing authors by nationality. The entries, typically a single paragraph long and confined to life and works, appear in alphabetical order and are signed. Both DLB and Greenwood continue their proliferation of collections of bio-bibliographical author essays. The latest contributions either...

... neglects African American writers. To cite but two examples: it mentions neither the Tuskegee Institute nor Wilmington, North Carolina, the setting of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. The pace of production of new volumes in the DLB series is slow- ing, I presume as the result...

... chopping of history into discrete bits is exacerbated by the fragmentation of some topics, particularly those associated with genre, society, and values. Scribner, it should also be noted, is now an imprint of Thomson/Gale, which also issues the DLB. A continuing proliferation of this series...

....” Other reference works with impressively comprehensive titles are in fact not so comprehensive. Twenty-First Century American Novelists, ed. Lisa Dabney and Suzanne Disheroon-Green (DLB 292), applies the typical and lavish DLB treatment—signed essay, primary and secondary bibliographies...

..., playwrights, critics, themes, and trends. The entries are brief (untypically, Eugene O’Neill gets a full two pages), factual rather than critical but also densely cross-referenced to other entries. Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Fifth Series, ed. Gar- rett Eisler (DLB 341; Gale Cengage...

... undergraduate and graduate courses. Two new volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series also warrant praise. American Radical and Reform Writers second series, ed. Hester Lee Furey (DLB 345), contains 36 author entries, including bio- graphical sketches of such figures as Horace Traubel...

... W. Oram, eds., The House of Knopf, 1915–1960: A Documentary Volume (DLB 355, Gale Cengage Learning). The topic of the volume is a compelling one. The Knopf publishing stable of authors included Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Ham- mett, Langston Hughes, H. L. Mencken, Wallace Stevens...

... reference books issued this year: the four-volume Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature (DLB 329–32), which contains the expected entries on Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Toni Morrison, and (ahem...

... to Modernist Poetry is a valuable expansion of the critical territory on modernism. The treatment of contemporary poets in Twenty-First-Century Ameri- can Poets, Second Series, ed. John Cusatis (DLB 374), following on the “first series” volume by the same editor (DLB 372), is in most respects...

... Tragedy”: A American Women (LSU) Documentary Volume (DLB 361) Renegade Poetics / Evie Shockley, Travel and Modernist Literature / Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics Alexandra Peat, Travel and and Formal Innovation in African Modernist Literature, Sacred and American Poetry (Iowa...

... repeats. The good news is that contemporary volumes like this one accompany the essays with telling interviews. The bad news is that library acquisi- tion of DLB is something like a child s addiction to baseball cards: the set must be complete, no matter how much bubble gum that means. In this case...

.... Now complete is Wesley T. Mott’s information-rich set of reference volumes in Gale’s DLB series: The American Renaissance in New England: Second Series (DLB 223 [2000], Concord writers); The American Renaissance in New England: Third Series (DLB 235, Boston and Cambridge writers...

... a more detailed examination of the entirety of the Hemingway–Dos Passos friendship. As a further example of the shift in the series, the DLB has issued— as it did for Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night—a volume dedicated to one work, in this case Charles Oliver’s...

... often erroneously attributed to his apprenticeships with writers such as Anderson, Stein, and Pound iv Criticism a. Full-Length Studies Matthew J. Bruccoli has edited the first DLB publication devoted to a single work, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Documentary Volume (DLB 219). Were...