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Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon is a 1928 children's novel by Dhan Gopal Mukerji that won the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1928. It deals with the life of Gay-Neck, a prized Indian pigeon. Mukerji wrote that "the message implicit in the book is that man and winged animals are brothers." He stated that much of the book is based on his boyhood experiences with a flock of forty pigeons and their leader, as the boy in the book is Mukerji himself. He did have to draw from the experiences of others for some parts of the book, such as those who trained messenger pigeons in the war. The book offers an insight into the life of a boy of high caste during the early 1900s and also into the training of pigeons. Several chapters are told from Gay-Neck's perspective, with the pigeon speaking in first person. Elizabeth Seeger writes in a biographical note about Mukerji that, "Gay-Neck was written in Brittany, where every afternoon he read to the children gathered about him on the beach the chapter he had written in the morning." In an article in the children's literature journal The Lion and the Unicorn, Meena G. Khorana calls the novel one of the few children's novels from Western or Indian authors to explore the Himalayas in a meaningful way (rather than simply using them as a setting), and notes the way Mukerji recalls their "grandeur and spiritual power". Gay-Neck, or Chitra-Griva, is born to a young owner in India. Gay-Neck's parents teach him how to fly, but he soon loses his father in a storm and his mother to a hawk. His master and Ghond the hunter take him out into the wilderness, but he becomes so scared by the hawks that he flees and ends up in a lamasery where the Buddhist monks are able to cure him of his fear. When his young master returns home he finds Gay-Neck waiting for him. But Gay-Neck decides to go on other long journeys, much to the boy's consternation. Then, during World War I, Gay-Neck and Ghond end up journeying to Europe where Gay-Neck serves as a messenger pigeon. He is chased by German machine-eagles (planes) and is severely traumatized when one of his fellow messenger pigeons is shot down. Gay-Neck and Ghond barely survive, and Gay-Neck is unable to fly. Ghond, Gay-Neck, and his master return to the lamasery near Singalila, where Ghond and Gay-Neck need to be cleansed of the hate and fear of the war. After that, Ghond succeeds in hunting down a buffalo that killed a villager, but feels remorse for having to kill the buffalo. Gay-Neck disappears once more, but when the other two return home, they find, to their joy, that Gay-Neck had already flown there ahead of them. (wikipedia.org)

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory. The novel is based on the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), and partially chronicles the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. The capture of the Southwest by the United States in the Mexican-American War is the catalyst for the plot."The Padre of Isleta", Anton Docher is identified as the character of Padre de Baca.Among the entities mentioned in the novel are Los Penitentes, a flagellant lay confraternity in Southern Colorado and New Mexico that still operates today. The novel was reprinted in the Modern Library series in 1931. It was included in Life Magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944. It was also included on Time's 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 and Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and was chosen by the Western Writers of America to be the 7th-best "Western Novel" of the 20th century.James Paul Old of Valparaiso University uses Death Comes for the Archbishop as a literary example of the notion that religious faith is able to develop and maintain strong social bonds in nascent democratic political orders. He argues that even though Cather's early novels, such as My Ántonia, typically represent religious characters as closed-minded, her personal religious realignment at the time allowed her to alter her perspective and develop more positive religious characters, in this case Catholic ones. And while some of her contemporary critics found her out of step with the experiences of common people, later critics, such as Old, praised her for a "search for a basis of order and cultural stability beyond the confines of contemporary secular culture."Additionally, scholars note that Latour's character is not strictly placed within the male-female binary, but instead, as Jennifer A. Smith argues, "oscillates between norms of femininity and masculinity." In developing a theory that Cather had questioned her own gender in the 1920s, Patrick W. Shaw suggests that "fundamental double entendres" and "elaborate image clusters" throughout the novel support a reading of sexual disregularity and ambiguity. (wikipedia.org)

Edward Eggleston (December 10, 1837 - September 3, 1902) was an American historian and novelist. Eggleston was born in Vevay, Indiana, to Joseph Cary Eggleston and Mary Jane Craig. The author George Cary Eggleston was his brother. As a child, he was too ill to regularly attend school, so his education was primarily provided by his father. He was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1856. He wrote a number of tales, some of which, especially the "Hoosier" series, attracted much attention. Among these are The Hoosier Schoolmaster, The Hoosier Schoolboy, The End of the World, The Faith Doctor, and Queer Stories for Boys and Girls.Eggleston was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1893.His boyhood home at Vevay, known as the Edward and George Cary Eggleston House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.His summer home, Owl's Nest, in Lake George, New York, eventually became his year-round home. Eggleston died there in 1902, at the age of 64. Owl's Nest was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971. His daughter, the writer, Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, was married to Elwyn Seelye, the founder of the New York State Historical Association. (wikipedia.org)

God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse is a 1927 book of poems by James Weldon Johnson patterned after traditional African-American religious oratory. African-American scholars Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West have identified the collection as one of Johnson's two most notable works, the other being Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson observed an absence of attention in folklore studies to what he called a "folk sermon," then went on to describe its nature and specific examples from his memory:I remember hearing in my boyhood sermons that were current, sermons that passed with only slight modifications from preacher to preacher and from locality to locality. Such sermons were: "The Valley of Dry Bones," which was based on the vision of the prophet in the 37th chapter of Ezekiel; the "Train Sermon," in which both God and the devil were pictured as running trains, one loaded with saints, that pulled up in heaven, and the other with sinners, that dumped its load in hell; the "Heavenly March," which gave in detail the journey of the faithful from earth, on up through the pearly gates to the great white throne. Then there was a stereotyped sermon which had no definite subject, and which was quite generally preached; it began with the Creation, went on to the fall of man, rambled through the trials and tribulations of the Hebrew Children, came down to the redemption by Christ, and ended with the Judgment Day and a warning and an exhortation to sinners.Johnson explains the title's use of the trombone by discussing the vocal and rhetorical qualities of a preacher he had recently heard who, he felt, exemplified the compelling and persuasive nature of the folk preacher, naming the trombone as "the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice - and with greater amplitude." He also cited a dictionary definition that noted the trombone as being the brass instrument most resembling the range and sound of the human voice.The seven poems were composed primarily in 1926, with "Go Down[,] Death" being composed in the space of a single afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, 1926, and the remaining five poems during a two-week retreat; "The Creation," the first poem of the set, had been composed about 1919.The work went on to find acclaim in many circles, proving "enormously popular among both the black cognoscenti as well of the masses of black Americans" and being used widely in oratorical contests; poet Owen Dodson wrote Johnson in 1932 to tell him that Dodson and his brother had taken first and second place in a poetry-recitation competition with works from that volume.Gates and West particularly note that the work "attempts a mimetic capturing of the black church sermon... without making recourse to the misspellings and orthographic tricks often employed in representing black vernacular speech." Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in a personal letter to the poet to thank him and offer to help promote the collection, praised the work as "heart-shakingly beautiful and original, with the peculiar piercing tenderness and intimacy which seems to me special gifts of the Negro. ...it is a profound satisfaction to find those special qualities so exquisitely expressed."The poem "The Creation" was used in the 1951 film Five, serving as the soliloquy for the character Charles, played by African-American actor Charles Lampkin. Lampkin convinced film-maker Arch Oboler to include excerpts of the poem in the final script of Five where it would become Lampkin's soliloquy for his character Charles. This may be the first time that audiences in the USA, Latin America, and Europe were exposed to African-American poetry, albeit not identified as such in the film. (wikipedia.org)