{"title":"Jennifer Horne","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"bottle-tree-book-jennifer-horne-9781934999868","title":"Bottle Tree","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49637487051025,"sku":"GOR013098867","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50402922365201,"sku":"CIN1934999865G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1934999865.jpg?v=1751029234"},{"product_id":"odyssey-of-a-wandering-mind-book-jennifer-horne-9780817361365","title":"Odyssey of a Wandering Mind","description":"A carefully rendered portrait of a brilliant but troubled daughter of the Old South who struggled against the conventions of gender, class, family, and ultimately of sanity, yet survived to define a creative life of her own   Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama’s governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly managed the family landholdings before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theater. Inventing a plastic compound while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as a journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and even a young John F. Kennedy, while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she struggled to find her way with both work and family, becoming increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years.   Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts—sometimes delusional, always savvy—to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of “having been restored to sanity,” enabling her to manage her own financial affairs and to live how and where she pleased. She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel based on the life of Mona Lisa, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Sara Mayfield left behind to sensitively render Mayfield’s struggle to move through the world as the person she was—and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753426067729,"sku":"NGR9780817361365","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0817361367.jpg?v=1763481829"},{"product_id":"working-the-dirt-book-jennifer-horne-9781588381316","title":"Working the Dirt","description":"Finalist for the SIBA Book Award  A loamy volume of verse thematically inspired, Working the Dirt celebrates Southerners' connections to the land. The selected poems share themes of gardening, farming, and the rich Southern soil. The approximately one hundred poets, known and lesser-known, living and dead, include: Fred Chappell, Walter McDonald, A. R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Wendell Berry, Henry Taylor, Tom Dent, Jesse Stuart, Jim Wayne Miller, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Marion Montgomery, James Whitehead, C. D. Wright, George Scarbrough, Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Thad Stem, Jr., William Sprunt, Donald Justice, Thomas Rabbitt, James Dickey, Rick Lott, John Allison, Edwin Godsey, Richard Jackson, Nikki Giovanni, Alvin Aubert, Margaret Walker, Emily Hiestand, Robert Gibbons, John Stone, Coppie Green, Bonnie Roberts, Coleman Barks, Anne George, Edward Eaton, Margaret Gibson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Butler, R. H. W. Dillard, Jane Gentry, Rodney Jones, Dannye Romine, Miller Williams, George Garrett, Sandra Agricola, Patricia Hooper, Gerald Berrax, Gibbons Ruark, Catherine Savage Brosman, Loretta Cobb, and Pattiann Rogers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50297457606929,"sku":"CIN1588381315G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1588381315.jpg?v=1751276730"},{"product_id":"letters-to-little-rock-book-jennifer-horne-9781639806317","title":"Letters to Little Rock","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51043210723601,"sku":"NIN9781639806317","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1639806318.jpg?v=1751343503"},{"product_id":"tell-the-world-you-re-a-wildflower-book-jennifer-horne-9780817318451","title":"Tell the World You're a Wildflower","description":"Tell the World You’re a Wildflower is a collection of loosely interwoven stories in the voices of southern women and girls of different ages and backgrounds. Beginning with the youngest characters and ending with the oldest, the stories encompass plastic surgery and white supremacists, family secrets and family trees, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a young writer who describes her work in progress as “the bastard love-child of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.”  In Tell the World You’re a Wildflower, each character must decide what to tell, whether to tell it, and to whom to tell it. Each struggles with questions of identity and truth, trying to understand who she is and what holds true for her. Some tell their stories plainly, directly, others more obliquely, nesting one within another. Anchored in the tradition of southern storytelling, these women contend with loss, change, and growth while going to church, school, and prison, navigating love and sex, and worrying too much about what people might think.  Yet these women generally refuse to behave, and they wander in and out of each other’s stories just like people do in small towns across the South. Small town lives are always interconnected: your third-grade teacher is your new neighbor’s aunt and the boy you dated your senior year falls from political grace after being caught in a hot tub with your second cousin. Though they may have had little say in where they were planted, Horne’s protagonists nevertheless do their best to bloom.  Rich, multifaceted, and unforgettable, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower is the work of a veteran explorer of the twentieth and twenty-first century South. Horne’s quest to understand her culture through decades of reading and observing has now yielded these narratives that imaginatively and insightfully enter the hearts and minds of southern women.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53705792749841,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53705793208593,"sku":"CIN0817318453VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780817318451.jpg?v=1782352859"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-ie\/collections\/author-books-by-jennifer-horne.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}