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The Newark Experience

Literary Lights

Newark's Literary Lights
Catharine Longendyck. Newark Public Library, 2016.
" We present here writers either born or living in Newark, or who otherwise have a strong connection to the City."

Poetry

Newarkpoems: 350 Years of Newark in Verse 1666-2016
Site developed in conjunction with the 350th anniversary of the founding of Newark.

Science Fiction

From the Newark Steam Man to Tom Swift
E.F. Bleiler. Extrapolation 30(2), Summer 1989, pp. 101-116
One strand of the science fiction genre can be traced to the Newark Steam Man, an invention of Zadoc P. Dederick. Stories about inventions, which may have their roots in the Dederick invention, are discussed. Rutgers-restricted Access
The Race of Machines: Blackness and Prosthetics in Early American Science Fiction
Taylor Evans. American Literature 90(3), September 2018, pp. 553-584
"The steam man is a trope of early US science fiction, one inaugurated by the first dime novel Edisonade, Edward Ellis's 1868 story The Steam Man of the Prairies. Focusing on early steam man stories as well as the historical origin of the trope--Zadoc Dederick's 1868 invention, dubbed the Newark Steam Man--this essay argues that the course of US science fiction and US technology more generally was shaped by the racial discourses of the Reconstruction." Rutgers-restricted Access
The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom
Sam Moskowitz. Reprint of the 1954 edition. Westport, Conn., Hyperion Press, 1974.
History of the early science fiction community of the 1930s and 1940s from superfan, historian, and commentator Newarker Sam Moskowitz who as a teenager founded the Newark chapter of the Science Fiction League and was one of the chief organizers of the First National Science Fiction Convention held at the Slovak Sokol Hall in Newark on May 29, 1938. Available?
Inventory of the Sam Moskowitz Collections
Finding aid to a large (49 linear feet) collection of Moskowitz materials in Special Collections at the Texas A & M University Cushing Memorial Library. The collection consists of Moskowitz's research files, correspondence, manuscripts, many of his books, and working documents related to his study of the history of science fiction and fantasy. Drafts of two unpublished books are included.
Eastern Science Fiction Association Records
ESFA was a science fiction fan group in Newark founded in the mid-1940s by Sam Moskowitz, who remained the group's director into the late 1970s. Meeting minutes, correspondence, and fliers advertising the ESFA's annual open meetings housed in the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University.

Stephen Crane

For a complete list of books in the Rutgers Libraries about Stephen Crane and his work, use this QuickSearch Link

Knowing Newark: Newark's Mixed Record in Honoring Native Son Stephen Crane
Charles Cummings. April 3, 1997.
Stephen Crane: A List of His Writings and Articles About Him
B.J.R. Stolper. For the Stephen Crane Association. Newark, N.J., Public Library, 1930.
 

Nathan Heard

Speaking Personally: Hope on Newark's Broadway
Nathan C. Heard. New York Times March 13, 1977, p. 415. Rutgers-restricted Access
The Nathan Heard Interviews
Eric Beaumont. African American Review 28, no. 3 (1994): 395–410.
Excerpts from nterviews done during June and July of 1993 with Nathan C. Heard. Rutgers-restricted Access

Philip Roth and Newark

For a complete list of books about Roth and his work in the Rutgers Libraries, use this QuickSearch link

A Tour of Philip Roth's Newark
William Mikesell. Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee, 2005.
Prepared in conjuction with a bus tour of Newark sites associated with Roth. Available?
A Tour of Philip Roth's Newark
Virtual Tour prepared by the Newark Public Library.
Newark Wars--Race Wars/Gang Wars
James D. Bloom IN Roth's Wars: A Career in Conflict Lexington Books, 2022, pp. 113-174. Rutgers-restricted Access
Roth's Jewish Weequahic: Perception or Reality and Why It Matters
Stuart S. Miller. Philip Roth Studies 18(1), 2022, pp. 80-102.
"It is argued here that Roth misreads some of what he witnessed and was ill-informed about developments in Weequahic beyond 1950. Had it been otherwise, his take on the local and national Jewish condition might have been very different." Rutgers-restricted Access
Geographical Contexts: Newark
Jessica Lang IN Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 123-131.
Newark, Newark, Newark
Ira Nadel IN Philip Roth: A Counterlife Oxford University Press, 2021. Rutgers-restricted Access
Newark: The Shtetl
Mark Shechner IN Roth After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 167-179. Rutgers-restricted Access
Here in New Jersey: Place in the Fiction of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and Junot Diaz
Ann McKinstry Micou. (DLitt) Drew University, 2014.
"This dissertation argues that three Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and Junot Díaz--a native, a transplant, and a migrant to New Jersey--convey the impact of place on their characters in an immediate and compelling way. The New Jersey neighborhoods they evoke--a Jewish enclave, a largely white suburb, and an immigrant ghetto--crucially affect their characters' destinies...The chapter on Roth examines the ambience of his Newark neighborhood and its consequences upon his narrators' identities, their feelings of belonging or of alienation, and their ambivalence about whether to stay or leave. " Available?
Newark's Just a Black Colony: Race in Philip Roth's American Pastoral
Jung-Suk Hwang. Twentieth Century Literature 64(2), June 2018, pp. 161-190.
"By drawing attention to the black voices represented through and circumscribed in the protagonist’s white victim narrative, I examine how Roth unmasks American society’s deep-rooted but still often overlooked racial and class divisions and criticizes the perpetuation of the American pastoral myth and the myth of the American Dream, which endures despite the counter-reality of African Americans’ experience." Rutgers-restricted Access
Newark in Myth and History
Robert Fulford. Queen's Quarterly 119(4), Winter 2012, pp. 539-546.
"Philip Roth...has reimagined Newark again and again, adding fresh layers to local legend." Rutgers-restricted Access
In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy
Michael Kimmage. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2012. Available?
"Un viaje a Newark en busca de la Polio"
Francisco Herrera Rodriguez. Cultura de los Cuidados Año XV, n. 31 (3. cuatrimestre 2011), pp.30-40.
"In this paper we present a study on Philip Roth's latest novel, Nemesis, in which the American writer reflects on the epidemic of polio in Newark (1944).
The Brick: Newark's Artistic Inquiry Into Urban Crisis
Sean Daniel Singer. Thesis (Ph.D.). Rutgers University, 2011.
Focuses on five Newark-born artists to show how close attentive readings of their work can reveal fresh thinking about urban problems. Looks at poet Amiri Baraka and novelist Philip Roth; jazz trombonist Grachan Moncur III; poet Lynda Hull; and photographer Helen Stummer. Available?
Nathan Zuckerman, Plato, and the Lost Republic of Newark
Daniel Paul Anderson. Philip Roth Studies 5(2), October 2009, pp. 165-177.
"This essay examines the role that Newark plays in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Bound books, specifically its role as a center of Jewishness. Tracing the model for Zuckerman’s Newark to Plato’s Republic, the essay shows how Zuckerman’s Aristotelian approach to literature causes conflict with his Platonic Jewish culture."
The Whitening of the Jews and the Changing Face of Newark
Roy Goldblatt. Philip Roth Studies 2(2), October 2006, pp. 86-101.
"In this article I will do two things: First, analyze the change in the ethnoracial position of Philip Roth’s Newark Jews, their shift from Other to inbetween and later to white, and then describe the changes that occurred in the city itself, or how a Jewish ghetto that provided safety and security to its community later became the destroyed dead place in which it is portrayed." Rutgers-restricted Access
Roth, Race, and Newark
Larry Schwartz. Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice 12(2005).
Na Mesa de Newark: comida e constituição da identidade judaico-americana na ficção de Philip Roth/The Newark Table: Food and the Forming of Jewish-American Identity in the Fictionof Philip Roth
Isadora Sinay. Arquivo Maaravi: Revista Digital de Estudos Judaicos da UFMG 17(n.32), May 2023.

Carteret Book Club

"The Carteret Book Club of Newark: An Historical Sketch and Bibliography,"
Richard Rabicoff. New Jersey History 92(2), Summer 1974, 93-102. Available?
The Carteret Book Club: Register of Officers and Members
Newark, N.J., 1926
Records of the Carteret Book Club of Newark, New Jersey
Description and finding aid to the collection at the Grolier Club Library in New York City.
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