The University of Utah Press FALL/WINTER 2012 CONTENTS New Books 1-17 New in Paperback 18 Featured Backlist 19-21 Essential Backlist 22-27 Index 28 E-book Availability The University of Utah Press has partnered with the ven- dors and aggregators listed below. Selected frontlist and backlist titles are available as e-books. Please consult the “These letters give a wonderful portrait of their appropriate site for availability and how to purchase. time—from the immediate pre–World War II years Amazon www.amazon.com/kindle-ebooks through the early part of that conflict. They also give the reader an intimate look at a very special literary Barnes & Noble www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks friendship, one which allowed DeVoto and Sterne Ebsco a unique freedom of expression. This is a significant www.ebscohost.com/ebooks contribution to American intellectual history.” —Carl Brandt, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. Ebrary www.ebrary.com On the Cover: A fine example of architecture in Salt Lake City’s Avenues neighborhood. Photo © Elizabeth Cotter. Our Mission The University of Utah Press is an agency of The University of Utah. In accor- dance with the mission of the University, the Press publishes and disseminates scholarly books in selected fields and other printed and recorded materials of significance to Utah, the region, the country, and the world. The University of Utah Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. www.UofUpress.com 1 Extraordinary letters between DeVoto and a fan ORD E R S offer a glimpse into the literary, cultural, and : 800-621-2736 historical world of the 1930s and ‘40s WWW.U OF U P R E SS. com The Selected Letters of Bernard DeVoto and Katharine Sterne Edited by Mark DeVoto Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) was a historian, critic, edi- exchanging opinions about life, literature, art, cur- tor, professor, political commentator, and conservation- rent events, family news, gossip, and their innermost NEW BOOKS ist, and above all a writer of comprehensive skill. As a feelings. DeVoto’s biographer, Wallace Stegner, states contributor for more than thirty years to Harper’s and that in these letters DeVoto “expressed himself more other magazines, he was known for his forceful opin- intimately than in any other writings.” Although their ions. His essays were often brash and opinionated and correspondence amounted to more than 868 letters LITE R kept him in the public limelight. One stinging essay (and is virtually complete on both sides), DeVoto and AT even led the FBI to create a file on him. His five serious Sterne never met, both of them doubtless realizing UR E/LETTE novels are forgotten today, but his magazine short sto- that physical remoteness permitted a psychological ries and the well-paid potboilers that he wrote under proximity that was deeply nourishing. RS a pseudonym (John August) subsidized the first of the This volume contains 140 of their letters. They have significant works of American history that brought been selected by DeVoto’s son Mark, who has also DeVoto lasting fame. Four of his historical works, all still provided detailed notes clarifying ambiguities and in print, are The Year of Decision: 1846, a Book-of-the- obscure references. Readers will enjoy these letters for Month Club selection in 1943; Across the Wide Missouri, their wit and literary flair, but they will also gain insight which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1948; 1953 into the cultural and historical crosscurrents of the National Book Award–winning The Course of Empire; 1930s and ’40s while taking an intimate and engaging and his popular abridged edition of the Journals of look at a friendship forged entirely through words. Lewis and Clark, which also appeared in 1953. A busy man with a busy life, DeVoto found time to write and answer letters in abundance. In 1933 Mark DeVoto, a son of Bernard and Avis DeVoto, is he received a fan letter from Katharine Sterne, a professor emeritus of music at Tufts University and a young woman hospitalized with tuberculosis; his staff writer for the Boston Musical Intelligencer, with reply touched off an extraordinary eleven-year cor- numerous publications in analysis of nineteenth- and respondence. Sterne had graduated with honors twentieth-century music to his credit. from Wellesley College in 1928 and had served as an assistant art critic at the New York Times before her Literature/Letters illness. Despite her enforced invalidism she main- October 2012 tained an active intellectual life. Sterne and DeVoto 504 pp., 6 x 9 wrote to each other until her death in 1944, some- 24 b/w illus. times in many pages and as often as twice a week, 978-1-60781-188-6, Cloth $29.95 Sample page from The Avenues of Salt Lake City. 3 A fascinating guidebook to more than 700 homes ORDERS: 800-621-2736 in this historic district of Salt Lake City WWW.UOFUPRESS.COM The Avenues of Salt Lake City Second Edition Karl T. Haglund and Philip F. Notarianni Revised by Cevan J. LeSieur Salt Lake City’s oldest residential historic district is a neighbor- “Useful to historians, architects, hood known as the Avenues. During the late nineteenth century city planners, preservationists, and this area was home to many of the most influential citizens of Salt tourists. The Avenues is one of the city’s NEW BOOKS Lake City. Built from 1860 until 1930, it contains a mix of middle least typical and most interesting districts, and upper middle class homes of varying architectural styles. This and having this book updated and back in architectural diversity makes the Avenues unique among Utah's U print will be a most welcome addition to TAH/G historic districts. For the past thirty years, as citizens have rediscov- our historical and architectural literature.” ered the value of living in historic properties near downtown and U IDEBOOK the University of Utah, preservation efforts have soared in the area. —Gary Topping, archivist, Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City In 1980, the Avenues was established as a historic district and the Utah Historical Society published The Avenues of Salt Lake City. That book’s authors, Karl T. Haglund and Philip F. Notarianni, gleaned Cevan LESIEUR is a native of Salt Lake much about the area’s history by using information found on the City and a resident of the Avenues neigh- historic district applications. This newly revised edition of The borhood where he and his wife Heather Avenues of Salt Lake City by Cevan J. LeSieur updates the origi- have restored two homes. nal with a greatly expanded section on the historic homes in the neighborhood, including more than 600 new photos, and addi- tional material covering the history of the Avenues since 1980. Utah/Guidebook September 2012 The book is designed so that readers can take it along as a guide 384 pp., 6½ x 8 when exploring the neighborhoods. All the pictures of Avenues 42 b/w photos, 720 color photos, 9 maps homes are accompanied with architectural information and brief 978-1-60781-181-7, Paper $29.95 histories of the properties. This volume makes a valuable resource for those interested in the history of the Avenues and its diverse architecture, and for anyone interested in Utah history, Utah archi- tecture, and historic preservation. “Upon arriving in Utah from Denmark, Andrew Christian Nielsen recorded the diet of his West Jordan neighbors with horror: ‘Their grub was mostly rabbit for breakfast, hare for dinner, and sorghum for supper with a little burnt molasses and cornmeal mush or cooked wheat.’ In contrast, Eliza Brockbank Hales summed up her pioneer diet in Spanish Fork: ‘Our food was plain but wholesome. We had milk, home-made bread, vegetables, dried fruit, and meat. Our home-cured hams were tops. We also had a barrel of corned beef and a good root cellar for potatoes, apples, vegetables, and so on.’ . Mormon pioneer foodways have proven to be diverse . [and] are distinguished from other contemporary American food patterns in three fundamental ways: geographical isolation, poverty, and ethnic tradition.”—from chapter 12 5 A groundbreaking and entertaining look at the ORDERS: 800-621-2736 food and drink of the earliest Mormon pioneers WWW.UOFUPRESS.COM Plain But Wholesome Foodways of the Mormon Pioneers Brock Cheney Plain But Wholesome presents a groundbreaking foray into “Interesting and engaging to read. It NEW BOOKS Mormon history. Brock Cheney explores the foodways of Mormon decodes and explains many references pioneers from their trek west through the arrival of the railroad to food in the historical record of the and reveals new perspectives on the fascinating Mormon settle- Mormon pioneer period.” MO R ment era. Relying on original diaries, newspaper accounts, and MON —Benjamin C. Pykles, historic sites curator recipe books from the 1850s, Cheney draws a vivid portrait of what S T Mormon pioneers ate and drank. Although other authors have U DIE sketched the subject before, this portrait is the first effort that S might be described as scholarly, though the lively prose will inter- BROCK CHENEY teaches writing and lit- /FOOD HI est a broad general audience. erature in Utah’s public schools and has worked at several living history museums S TO Presented here are the first explicit descriptions of the menus, in Utah and Colorado. He lives in Willard, R food processes, and recipes of the Mormon pioneers. While many Utah, where he keeps a vegetable garden Y have supposed that earlier pioneer foodways continued to be and bakes bread in his wood-fired brick handed down through Mormon families, Cheney has confirmed oven. traditions going back generations and covering more than a cen- tury.