La Fontaine's Complete Fables in Modern Verse (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781492250265)

Randolph Paul Runyon, recently retired after 35 years of teaching French at Miami University of Ohio, is the author of eleven other books since 1981, including a commentary on the Fables (In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables) and the first genuinely complete English translation of the Contes et Nouvelles en Vers (La Fontaine's Complete Tales in Verse: An Illustrated and Annotated Translation). In these and other books he draws out the "intratextuality" of literary collections such as La Fontaine's Fables and Tales, showing how the individual parts of such collections fit together in surprising ways. These books include commentaries on Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and Spleen de Paris, Montaigne's Essays, Robert Penn Warren's poetry, and Raymond Carver's short stories. In a totally different vein, in Delia Webster and Underground Railroad he narrates the remarkable life of the first white woman to be imprisoned for helping slaves escape. That book has been praised as a "Victorian melodrama [that] reads like a detective story, and yet is serious scholarship that makes a significant contribution to the historiography of slavery, abolitionism, the Old South, and nineteenth-century American reform. Many of the aging 'new social' historians will wish that they had written a book as appealing as this one." He has maintained in addition an active musical career as composer, organist and choir director, and as an exponent of American popular piano styles from ragtime to the Jazz Age. Several of his organ compositions have been published by Evensong: Music, Media and Graphics (http: //www.evensongmusic.net/runyonorgan.html), and have been recorded by other artists on YouTube.