University Press of Mississippi

The Courting of Marcus Dupree

At the time of Marcus Dupree’s birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi …

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From Midnight to Guntown: True Crime Stories from a Federal Prosecutor in Mississippi

As a federal prosecutor in Mississippi for over thirty years, John Hailman worked with federal agents, lawyers, judges, and criminals of every stripe. In From Midnight to Guntown, he recounts amazing trials and bad guy antics from the darkly humorous to the needlessly tragic.In addition to bank robbers–generally the dumbest criminals–Hailman describes scam artists, hit men, protected witnesses, …

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Return to Guntown: Classic Trials of the Outlaws and Rogues of Faulkner Country

A federal prosecutor in Mississippi for over thirty years, John Hailman routinely worked with federal agents, lawyers, judges, and criminals of every type imaginable. Encouraged by the acclaim for his earlier book, From Midnight to Guntown, he has opened even more of the astonishing cases within the over thirty-five boxes full of trial stories he carried into retirement.Hailman …

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A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz (Great Comics Artists Series)

Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip franchise, the most successful of all time, forever changed the industry. For more than half a century, the endearing, witty insights brought to life by Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and Lucy have caused newspaper readers and television viewers across the globe to laugh, sigh, gasp, and ponder. A Charlie Brown Religion explores …

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He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time (American Made Music Series)

When George Jones recorded “He Stopped Loving Her Today” more than thirty years ago, he was a walking disaster. Twin addictions to drugs and alcohol had him drinking Jim Beam by the case and snorting cocaine as long as he was awake. Before it was over, Jones would be bankrupt, homeless, and an unwilling patient at an Alabama …

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The Superhero Reader

Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture.While superhero comics are a distinct and sometimes disdained branch of comics creation, they are integral to the development of the North American comic book …

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Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (Great Comics Artists Series)

Jack Kirby (1917-1994) is one of the most influential and popular artists in comics history. With Stan Lee, he created the Fantastic Four and defined the drawing and narrative style of Marvel Comics from the 1960s to the present day. Kirby is credited with creating or cocreating a number of Marvel’s mainstay properties, among them the X-Men, the …

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The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the …

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The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay

In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted “sequential art” definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions …

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Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips

Among the many accomplishments in art and literature by Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846), his virtual invention of the comic strip, or graphic novel, stands out as the most surprising, curious, and to us, after a century inundated by comic strips, by far the most significant.This volume is the first English-language version of the Töpffer comics oeuvre and includes …

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