Literature and Aging An Anthology Edited by Martin Kohn, Carol Donley and Delese Wear Literature & Medicine Series, #1 1992, 456 pp ISBN 0-87338-466-0 USAC Paper, $29.00 courtesy of our partner, Atlas Books Call (419) 281-1802 to order by phone.

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Some of the world's greatest literature is devoted to expressing the joys and sorrows humans experience as they grow old. New opportunities and challenges appear: retirement, a special closeness with the family, failing health, the recognition of personal mortality, prejudice against the elderly, and grief over the losses of loved ones and places. This collection of more than 60 short stories, poems, and plays addresses these issues primarily through the works of modern American writers, including Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Edward Albee, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. The selections represent the experience of aging from the perspective of persons of diverse color, ethnicity, and background, and are complemented by illustrator Elizabeth Layton's wry and perceptive prints.

Martin Kohn is associate professor of behavior sciences at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in Rootstown, Ohio, and codirector, with Carol Donley, of the Center for Literature, Medicine, and Health Care Professions at Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio. He is coeditor, with Carol Donley of Recognitions: Doctors and Their Stories (Kent State University Press, 2002).

Carol Donley is professor of English at Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio. She is the coauthor of Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge University Press, 1986), and coeditor of The Tyranny of the Normal (Kent State University Press, 1996) and What’s Normal?: Narratives of Mental and Emotional Disorders (Kent State University Press, 2000).

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