VESUVIUS AT HOME

Vesuvius at Home: Ten Days in the Life, Loves and Mystery of Emily Dickinson will be the first narrative biography to unravel the mysteries and dramatic events in the poet's life. While other biographies have provided expansive information , academic analysis, or glimpses of only a part of her life, Vesuvius will use the tension, vitality and immediacy of narrative to offer a compelling story. The book will convey the whole of the poet's life by highlighting the foremost people and events that shaped her. Each of the ten chapters will examine a propitious moment in her life: Dickinson's religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, her startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, her anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” her exhilarating frenzy of composition, her terror in confronting blindness. Together, the ten chapters will paint a concise and vivid portrait of a life being lived.

With impeccable credentials as a Dickinson scholar and a distinguished publishing record in narrative non-fiction, Martha Ackmann is the ideal writer to bring Emily Dickinson's story to life. A professor at Mt. Holyoke, Ackmann has been teaching and writing about Dickenson for over 30 years. She holds that there is as yet no book of reasonable length which she could assign to her undergraduate students that would impart the flavor of her whole life. In her role as President of the Emily Dickinson International Society, she organized the largest international gather of Dickinson scholars ever. She was the first professor to teach Emily Dickinson in her actual home in Amherst, has already written extensively about her, and maintains an award-winning course website at Holyoke dedicated to the poet. The author of The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight (Random 2000) and Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro Leagues (Chicago Review Press, 2009), Ackmann is recognized as an award-winning writer of narrative non-fiction about American women.