Search results for ""author john matteson""

Louisa May Alcott is known universally. Yet during Louisa's youth, the famous Alcott was her father, Bronson—an eminent teacher and a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He desired perfection, for the world and from his family. Louisa challenged him with her mercurial moods and yearnings for money and fame. The other prize she deeply coveted—her father's understanding—seemed hardest to win. This story of Bronson and Louisa's tense yet loving relationship adds dimensions to Louisa's life, her work, and the relationships of fathers and daughters.

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December 1862 drove the United States towards a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved towards singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman—a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety; and Louisa May Alcott—a struggling writer, seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration-tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause. A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.

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Since its publication in 1868, the beloved children’s classic Little Women, has been handed down from mother to daughter. It has inspired an opera, three films and a musical. In this lavish four-colour edition, renowned Alcott expert John Matteson brings unprecedented vibrancy to the book, to the March family it creates and to the Alcott family who inspired it. With numerous photographs taken for this edition, readers discover the extraordinary links between the real and the fictional family. Matteson’s annotations bring us back in touch with the objects and culture of a distant but still-relevant time. His introductory essays examine Little Women’s pivotal place in children’s literature and tell the story of Alcott herself, a tale every bit as captivating as her fiction.

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