UA Press Distributes Book To More Than 300 Universities

FAYETTEVILLE - The University of Arkansas Press will distribute copies of one of its books, "Forward Positions: the War Correspondence of Homer Bigart" to 345 schools and departments of journalism in the United States, Canada and overseas, UA Press Director Lawrence J. Malley announced today.

The book is a collection of 50 newspaper dispatches by Bigart, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who spent 40 years as a reporter and correspondent for the Herald Tribune in New York and The New York Times. The book, edited by Betsy Wade, a Times editor and reporter who also worked for the Tribune, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1992.

Bigart started his work as a foreign correspondent in World War II, seeing his first combat aboard a bomber on an air raid into Germany, and continuing on muleback through Sicily. He spent 60 days on the beachhead at Anzio, Italy. He was shifted to the Pacific and was in the group of first correspondents on the ground in Hiroshima. He covered Israel's struggle for independence, the Korean War, the Middle East, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Vietnam War in 1962 and the Mylai Trial in 1971. His Pulitzers were for coverage of the Pacific War and then for Korea.

"The gift of books, unlike any the University of Arkansas Press has previously been involved with, was sponsored by the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York, which awards the annual Pulitzer Prizes," Malley said. "The financing came from the New York Times Company Foundation in memory of Bigart, a major figure in his 17 years at the paper. Bigart retired in 1972 and died in 1991 at the age of 83."

Dean Tom Goldstein of Columbia said in his gift letter to the journalism schools that he wanted Bigart's work to be taught to students and available to alumni and other readers through school libraries. The work of Bigart, Dean Goldstein said, "remains uniquely alive and his challenges to censorship and intimidation still ring true."

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, with headquarters in Columbia, S.C., provided the list of schools and departments for distribution of the gift.

The UA Press published "Forward Positions" while the poet Miller Williams, an admirer of Bigart, was director. It has remained on the backlist since then.

The University of Arkansas Press was founded in 1980 as the book publishing division of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, the UA Press publishes approximately 30 titles a year, about a third of which fall under the general heading of Arkansas and Regional Studies.

The Press is charged by the Trustees of the University with the publication of books in service to the academic community and for the enrichment of the broader culture, especially works of value that are likely to be turned aside by commercial houses. This press, like all university presses, has as its central and continuing mission the dissemination of the fruits of research and creative activity.

To order one of the University of Arkansas Press titles or a Fall 2000 catalog, call 1-800-626-0090 or visit the UA Press web site at www.uapress.com to shop online.

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