<DIV>Liberator? Madman? Genius? Martyr?  John Brown achieved immediate and<BR>lasting notoriety through his attempt to foment an armed insurrection among<BR>black slaves in 1859, an event that many believed hastened the outbreak of<BR>the U.S. Civil War. From the moment of his capture at Harper's Ferry,<BR>Virginia, there have been widely varying interpretations of the man and his<BR>motivations. Sometimes depicted as the grim conscience of a nation whose<BR>founding proclaimed the equality of all people, sometimes portrayed as a<BR>terrorist more devoted to his own martyrdom than to his cause, Brown has<BR>been a source of inspiration, fascination, and frustration for some of the<BR>country's greatest writers and artists.<BR><BR>In this absorbing book, Bruce Ronda examines the representations of Brown<BR>chronologically, ranging from Thoreau's “Plea for Captain John Brown”-with<BR>its ardent defense of Brown as a patriot, Transcendentalist, and true New<BR>Englander-through treatments by anonymous southern writers and well-known<BR>authors such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Herman Melville, Richard Henry<BR>Dana, Frederick Douglass, William Dean Howells, and Edwin Arlington<BR>Robinson. Ronda then considers the major treatments of Brown in the early to<BR>mid-twentieth century by W. E. B. DuBois, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Robert<BR>Penn Warren. Of particular interest are discussions of a 1930s poem by<BR>Muriel Rukeyser, Truman Nelson's 1960 novel The Surveyor, and artwork by<BR>Jacob Lawrence. He concludes with studies of novels by three contemporary<BR>authors: Russell Banks, Michelle Cliff, and Bruce Olds.<BR><BR>Reading the Old Man challenges the assumption that literature about Brown<BR>falls predictably into two camps-celebration or outrage-either defending<BR>Brown as liberator and martyr or vilifying him as a traitor, incendiary, and<BR>madman.  Instead, Ronda discovers a variety of approaches and reveals<BR>subtler, more complex portraits, even comparing Brown's fervor to that of<BR>today's religious terrorists.<BR><BR>Bruce Ronda is professor and chair of the Department of English at Colorado<BR>State University. He is the author of Intellect and Spirit: The Life and<BR>Works of Robert Coles and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own<BR>Terms. He is the editor of The Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American<BR>Renaissance Woman.<BR></DIV>