Bios
Ron Powers
Ron Powers (born 1941) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer. His works include White Town Drowsing: Journeys to Hannibal, Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain, and Mark Twain: A Life. With James Bradley, he co-wrote the 2000 #1 New York Times Bestseller Flags of Our Fathers.
Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1973 for his critical writing as TV-radio-columnist for Chicago Sun-Times about television during 1972. He was the first television critic to win the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1985, Powers won an Emmy Award for his work on CBS News Sunday Morning.
Personal/influence
Powers was born in 1941 in Hannibal, Missouri — Mark Twain's hometown. Hannibal was influential in much of Powers' writing — as the subject of his book White Town Drowsing, as the location of the two true-life murders that are the subject of Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore, and as the home of Mark Twain. Powers has said that his fascination with Twain — the subject of two of his books — began in childhood:
"When I was a little boy in Hannibal, he was a mystic figure to me. His pictures and books and images were all over (my friend) Dulany Winkler's house, and I spent a lot of time there. I just wanted to reach out and touch him. Eventually I was able to."
In addition to writing, Powers has taught for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Salzburg Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, and at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.
Powers is married and has two sons. He currently resides in Castleton, Vermont.
Bibliography
Newscasters: The News Business As Show Business. St. Martins Press. 1979. ISBN 0312572085.
White Town Drowsing: Journeys to Hannibal. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press. 1986. ISBN 087113103X.
The Beast, the Eunuch, and the Glass-Eyed Child: Television in the 80s. Harcourt. 1990. ISBN 031226240X.
Far From Home: Life and Loss in Two American Towns. Random House. 1991. ISBN 0394570340.
The Cruel Radiance Notes of a Prosewriter in a Visual Age. Middlebury College Press. 1994.
Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain. New York: Da Capo Press. 1999. ISBN 0-306-81086-7.
Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America. St. Martin's Press. 2001. ISBN 0-312-26240-X.
Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press. 2005. ISBN 0743248996.
Co-authored
James Bradley and Ron Powers (2000). Flag of Our Fathers. Bantam. ISBN 0553111337.
Robert Morgan and Ron Powers (2001). The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle: Memoir of a WWII Bomber Pilot. Dutton Adult. ISBN 0525946101.
John Baldwin and Ron Powers (2007). Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship. Crown Publishers. ISBN 9780307236555.
Ron Powers Youtube on Mark Twain: A Life
Victor Fischer
Victor Fischer has been an editor at the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library since 1967. Among his most recent publications are the trade and scholarly editions volumes 3 and 4 of Mark Twain's Letters (1992, 1995), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2001, 2003), Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living: A Handbook for the Damned Human Race (2004), and Mark Twain’s Letters, 1876–1880 (2007, web publication only). New this year are a special 125th anniversary edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and (as one of a team of editors) the first volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain.
More than forty volumes edited by the Mark Twain Project have been published by the University of California Press to date and in 2007 the Project launched The Mark Twain Project Online, a web-based edition of Mark Twain’s works (marktwainproject.org). The Project is based in the Mark Twain Papers of The Bancroft Library, the world's largest and most comprehensive archive of manuscripts and documents by and about Mark Twain.
Vic, a native of Los Angeles, has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since he came to Berkeley to attend the University of California. He and his wife have two children, a daughter and a son.
Linda A. Morris
Professor Emeritus
University of California, Davis
Ph.D. in English, University of California, Berkeley.
M. A. in English, University of Washington.
B. A. in English, Grinnell College
Publications on Mark Twain
Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression, University of Missouri Press. 2007
“American Satire: Beginning Through Mark Twain,” A Companion to Satire from the Biblical World to the Present, Ed., Ruben Quintero. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006
“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper as Children’s Literature,” A Companion to Mark Twain. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
“The Eloquent Silence in ‘Hellfire Hotchkiss,’” Mark Twain Annual, 3, 2005.
“Beneath the Veil: Clothing, Race and Gender in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson,” Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, Ed. S. Berger. New York: Norton, 2005.
“Beneath the Veil: Clothing, Race and Gender in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson,” Studies in American Fiction (Spring 1999).
Positions Held at the University of California, Davis
Chair, Department of English, 1998-2002; 2005.
Professor of English, 1996-
Director, Women’s Studies Program, 1992-1996.
Director of Writing Programs, 1981-1987.
Contact information:
2237 Jefferson Ave., Berkeley, CA 94703
lamorris@ucdavis.edu