Scribners tells the inside story of five generations—over 150 years—at the legendary publishing house of Charles Scribners Sons, beginning with its founding in an unused chapel in downtown New York, continuing through its golden era on Fifth Avenue above the famous landmark bookstore and down to the present day. The author, the fifth ......
Since its publication in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye has been a cultural phenomenon, not only as an assigned text for English courses, but as a touchstone for generations of alienated youth. As the focus of recent major films and a successful off-Broadway play attest, J.D. Salinger and his novel continue to fascinate an American reading public. ......
The Founding Fathers are well known in the history of the United States for building the economic and political foundations of America. But who founded cultural and spiritual America? For John Fentress Gardner, it was not until the following generation that the revolutionary principles of American cultural and spiritual life were laid down by ......
First published in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark’s writings on the Brontë sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Brontë’s poems. Perceptively but unsentimentally, Spark considers the Brontës’ lives and works, including their generally disastrous attempts at teaching, and reflects on her own ......
The third of memoirs by the novelist, dramatist and Oscar-winning screenwriter, Frederic Raphael. This volume contains various observations about his life as a screenwriter in 1970s Hollywood.
How the Three Daughters of a Country Parson Became the Most Revolutionar
This fascinating work shares the intimate details of the Bronte sisters' lives and reveals how their imagination, creativity, and passion helped them achieve their childhood dreams of being published authors.
Brian W. Aldiss wrote classic science fiction novels like Report on Probability A and Hothouse. Billion Year Spree, his groundbreaking study of the field, defined the very meaning of SF and delineated its history. Yet Aldiss's discomfort with being a guiding spirit of the British New Wave and his pursuit of mainstream success characterized a ......
Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman's prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the ......
The Du Mauriers, Just As They Were tells the story of five generations of this remarkable family, beginning with Mathurin-Robert Busson, a master glassblower who immigrated to London in 1789, added the suffix ‘Du Maurier’ to his name, and so became a ‘gentleman glassblower’. His three English-born children relocated to the continent, ......
The 1987 publication of Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas helped trigger the British renaissance of radical hard science fiction and influenced a generation of New Space Opera masters. The thirteen SF novels that followed inspired an avid fandom and intense intellectual engagement while Banks's mainstream books vaulted him to the top ......
E. B. White (1899-1985) is best known for his children's books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. Columnist for The New Yorker for over half a century and co-author of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, White hit his stride as an American literary icon when he began publishing his "One Man's Meat" columns from his ......
The Real Story Behind the Wild West's Greatest Tale
His mother was against it, but he grew up to be a cowboy anyway. Zane Grey was a corn-fed mid-westerner who ended up an unhappy dentist in New York City. After a journey to Arizona and Utah in 1907, he decided he would rather wear chaps and a Stetson rather than return to a mundane life pulling teeth in Manhattan. Thus began his career as a ......
"This fresh biography of Ian Fleming presents an illuminating portrayal of the iconic creator of James Bond. Oliver Buckton provides the first in-depth exploration of the process of Ian Flemings writing, his wartime intelligence work, and the strong women in his life, concluding with a thorough analysis of the James Bond films and Flemings ......
The first in-depth biography of distinguished academic novelist Stanley ElkinShouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of ......
Born in Chicago in 1870, Frank Norris led a life of adventure and art. He moved to San Francisco at fifteen, spent two years in Paris painting, and returned to San Francisco to become an internationally famous author. He died at age thirty-two from a ruptured appendix. During his short life, he wrote an inspired series of novels about the United ......
The first accurate and thorough biography of the man behind the myths of the Old West.Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early ......
Hemingway's passion was writing-he was inspired by a lifetime of daring adventures and encouraged by the many women in his life. He nurtured his creativity by purposely seeking dangerous situations to test his own levels of courage and to create literary heroes that displayed grace under pressure. His masculine, adventurous spirit appealed to ......
VOLTAIRE: A REFERENCE GUIDE TO HIS LIFE AND WORKS offers an accessible introduction to this key 18th-century French author. This Guide offers 21st-century readers a glimpse into the multifaceted Voltaire: the thinker, rebel, writer, exile, and campaigner who became a transnational celebrity in his day. A wide-ranging Introduction situates the ......
The author of fifteen books set in the Sunshine State, Theodore Pratt (1901-1969) enjoyed an unofficial title of "Literary Laureate of Florida" in the middle of the twentieth century. His writings particularly capture the culture of south Florida, most famously in his "Florida Trilogy"-beginning with his most famous book, The Barefoot Mailman ......
Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime
The first full-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime secret love of the celebrated poet T. S. Eliot. In January 2020, the T. S. Eliot estate finally opened the largest and most eagerly awaited cache of new materials written by the Nobel-Prize-winning poet: the 1,131 letters he sent Emily Hale, his little-known American love. But even as ......
Georg Forster (1754-1794) was famous during his lifetime, notorious after his death, and largely forgotten by the later nineteenth century. Remembered today as the young man who sailed around the world with Captain Cook and as one of the leading figures in the revolutionary Republic of Mainz, Forster was also a prolific writer and translator who ......
Jack Kerouac was one of America's great writers of the latter half of the 20th century, yet he endured a life characterized by persistent hardship and disillusion. Leading Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. targets the writer's embattled insight of self as central to his life and work. He reveals how Kerouac's troubled interactions with alcohol, ......
Demystifying the "Poet Laureate of Depression" Pleasure-loving, sarcastic, stubborn, determined, erotic, deeply sad--Jane Kenyon's complexity and contradictions found expression in luminous poems that continue to attract a passionate following. Dana Greene draws on a wealth of personal correspondence and other newly available materials to delve ......
This engrossing narrative recounts the story of Jane de La Vaudere (nee Jeanne Scrive), a prolific and celebrated writer of France's Belle Epoque. Interweaving biography and literary analysis, Sharon Larson examines the ways in which La Vaudere adapted her persona to shifting literary trends and readership demands-and how she created and profited ......
An homage to the life of poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students. The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum but also reflects, through both form and content, on the complexities of seeing both the parts and the whole. The book presents different aspects of Judith-poet, ......
An homage to the life of poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students. The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum but also reflects, through both form and content, on the complexities of seeing both the parts and the whole. The book presents different aspects of Judith-poet, ......
