Search results for ""The Library of America""

There are a brilliant array of contemporary voices here as well, spinning out the tapestry of Latino poetry in daring new directions. Taking the measure of this current renaissance, the anthology culminates with the most comprehensive survey of twenty-first century Latino poetry yet published. Featured poets include: Jose Marti, Julia de Burgos, Sandra Cisneros, Pedro Pietri, Juan Felipe Herrera, Jaime Manrique, Javier Zamora, Aracelis Girmay, Natalie Diaz, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon.

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The Library of America presents the first of two volumes in its definitive Updike collection. Here are 102 classic stories that chart Updike’s emergence as America’s foremost practitioner of the short story, “our second Hawthorne,” as Philip Roth described him. Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of composition, established here for the first time.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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In 1855, a small volume appeared, self-published by a failed Brooklyn journalist and carpenter: twelve untitled poems and a preface announcing the author's aims. A commercial failure, this book was the first stage of a massive, lifelong enterprise. Six editions and thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass had been recognized as one of the central masterworks of world poetry. This Library of America Paperback Classic includes two complete texts: the 1855 first edition and the magnificent culminating edition of 1891-1892. For almost thirty years, The Library of America has presented America's best and most significant writing in acclaimed hardcover editions. Now, a new series, Library of America Paperback Classics, offers attractive and affordable books that bring The Library of America's authoritative texts within easy reach of every reader. Each book features an introductory essay by one of a leading writer, as well as a detailed chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the choice and history of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan, volume #3 in the Library of America series.

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For Arthur Miller's centennial year, The Library of America and editor Tony Kushner present the final volume in the definitive collected edition of the essential American dramatist. Here are eleven masterful, haunting, funny, and provocative later plays, from the double-bill Danger: Memory (1987) to Finishing the Picture (2004), Miller’s final stage work, based loosely on events around the filming of The Misfits, in 1960, with Marilyn Monroe. In between, Miller revisits the perennially rich themes that define his work—the vagaries of fate and chance, the press of public events on private lives—with such plays as The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, The Last Yankee, Broken Glass, Mr. Peters’ Connections, and Resurrection Blues. Also presented in the volume are the early play The Golden Years, about the conquest of Mexico, which Miller revised for its first production in 1987; several shorter one-act plays and never-before-published early works and radio plays; and a selection of Miller’s incisive prose reflections on his art, among them “On Screenwriting and Language” and “About Theatre Language.”LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. Yet his most remarkable literary creation--his journals--remained unpublished. Begun when he was a precocious Harvard junior of 16 and continued without significant lapse for almost 60 years, Emerson's journals were his life's work. They were the starting point for virtually everything in his celebrated essays, lectures, and poems. It would be a hundred years after his death before these intimate records would appear in print in their entirety, and they are still, at over three million words, among the least known and least available of Emerson's writings. With Selected Journals 1820-1842 and its companion volume Selected Journals 1841-1877, The Library of America presents the most ample and comprehensive nonspecialist edition of Emerson's great work ever published--one that retains the original order in which he composed his thoughts and preserves the dramatic range of his unique style in long, uninterrupted passages, but without the daunting critical apparatus of the 16-volume scholarly edition. Each volume includes a 16-page portfolio of images of Emerson and his contemporaries, a note on the selections, extensive notes, biographical sketches, a chronology, and an index. This volume begins with Emerson's first journal entry, on January 25, 1820, in a homemade booklet he titled The Wide World, and follows him through his early years at Harvard College and the Divinity School, his ordination as a Unitarian minister, his marriage to Ellen Tucker and her untimely death, his fateful decision to leave the ministry, and his travels in England and on the Continent. It offers an irreplaceable perspective on the intellectual currents of the day--the emergence of Transcendentalism; the furor over Emerson's "Divinity School Address"; the founding of The Dial; experiments in communal living at Fruitlands and Brook Farm--and intimate sketches of Emerson's friends and contemporaries, including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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?In his stories of mystery and imagination Poe created a world-record for the English language: perhaps for all languages.?--George Bernard ShawRead throughout the world, admired by writers as different as Dostoevsky and H.G. Wells, translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer. All of Poe?s best-known and most representative works are gathered here, as well as his masterly ?The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.?Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today?s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author?s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes.The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, volume number 19 in The Library of America series. It is joined in the series by a companion volume, number 20, Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews.

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Nearly thirty years in the making, The Library of America's eleven-volume edition of the complete fiction of Henry James now culminates with this authoritative volume collecting his final three finished works. Considered by James to be his most finely constructed novel, The Ambassadors (1903) recounts the attempts of a conscientious American to convince the son of a friend to return home from Paris-and in doing so plays the charm of the Old World against the provincialism of the New. In The Golden Bowl (1904), an American woman marries an Italian prince while her father unknowingly marries the prince's former mistress; James underscores both the fragility and strength of human ties and further develops what he once called the "complex fate, being an American." Originally written for the stage but never produced, James reworked The Outcry (1911) into a highly successful comic novel of social manners that also deals with the ethics of art collecting. Included as an appendix is "The Married Son," the chapter James contributed to The Whole Family (1908), a multi-author novel conceived by William Dean Howells and portraying a dysfunctional family whose struggles mirror the frustrated collaborative efforts of the book's twelve contributors.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Featuring a wide range of writings from Hearn’s time in America, this collection is a stunning showcase of the Greek-Irish author’s uniquely decadent literary flair and keen eye for observation A translator of Flaubert and Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn was the master of a gaudy and sometimes self-consciously decadent literary style, but he was also a tough-minded and keenly observant reporter, with an eye for the offbeat, the sensual, and occasionally the gruesome. The writings of his American years collected in this Library of America volume—on subjects as wide ranging as comparative folklore, the history of musical instruments, French literary avant-gardes, and New Orleans voodoo—reveal an omnivorous curiosity and an always eclectic sensibility. Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), a stylized retelling of ancient legends, foreshadows Hearn's later fascination with Asian themes. The exquisitely crafted novels Chita (1889), about the devastation wrought by a Louisiana hurricane, and Youma (1890), about a slave rebellion in Martinique, epitomize his writing at its most luxuriantly romantic, alert to the interactions of diverse cultures and suffused with imagistic splendor. His extraordinary travel book Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), presented here with the many illustrations from its first edition, provides a richly impressionistic account of his long stay on Martinique and other Caribbean islands. Also included are personal letters as well as more than a dozen examples of Hearn's journalism from the 1870s and 1880s, depicting vividly: a raucous African-American nightclub on the Cincinnati waterfront; an execution; scenes of Mardi Gras and the New Orleans French Quarter; an uncharted village of Filipino fishermen in a remote Louisiana bayou. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpiecesWriting to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel.James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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The first volume in a four-volume series on the American Civil War—featuring first-hand writings from Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and moreThis “mesmerizing and deeply troubling” glimpse into the Civil War era “will forever deepen the way you see this central chapter in our history . . . a masterpiece” (Newsweek). After 150 years the Civil War is still our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic-our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a "new birth of freedom.” Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year gathers over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis. Beginning on the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, this volume presents writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like proslavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color hand-drawn endpaper maps, and an index. Companion volumes will gather writings from the second, third, and final years of the conflict. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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James Merrill described Elizabeth Bishop’s poems as “more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime” and called her “our greatest national treasure.” Robert Lowell said, “I enjoy her poems more than anybody else’s.” Long before a wider public was aware of Bishop’s work, her fellow poets expressed astonished admiration of her formal rigor, fiercely observant eye, emotional intimacy, and sometimes eccentric flights of imagination. Today she is recognized as one of America’s great poets of the twentieth century.This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Elizabeth Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III. In addition it contains an extensive selection of unpublished poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes’ The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas.Poems, Prose, and Letters also brings together most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop’s irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the fifty-three letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, the most comprehensive one-volume edition of Thornton Wilder’s work for the stage ever published, takes the measure of his extraordinary career as a dramatist by presenting the complete span of his achievement, beginning with his early expressionist experiments and daring one-act plays, such as “The Long Christmas Dinner” and “The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden” (one of Wilder’s personal favorites), ranging through the full flowering of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker, and encompassing the intriguing dramatic projects of his later years, such as his adaptation of the ancient story of Alcestis (The Alcestiad) and plays written for dramatic cycles based on the Seven Deadly Sins and the varied ages of an individual’s life. Complementing the selection of plays is an illuminating group of essays that captures Wilder’s reflections on his plays and contains a revealing epistolary account of the film adaptation of Our Town.This volume also includes material never before published: scenes from The Emporium, an ambitious unfinished play that, emerging out of Wilder’s intense engagement with existentialist philosophy in the postwar years, imagines a Kafkaesque department store whose enigmatic activities are as inscrutable as the mysteries of life itself; and the complete screenplay Wilder wrote for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt just before reporting for military service in 1942. Although faithful to the spirit of the film, the screenplay presented here restores Wilder’s original dialogue, some of which (to Wilder’s dismay) was altered for the movie. A study of family life, youthful illusions, and the desperation of a criminal on the run, the Shadow of a Doubt screenplay is a masterful exhibition of the art of suspense and taut dramatic storytelling, and is an essential part of Wilder’s oeuvre.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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"It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department," John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, "to say what the law is." As its Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, Marshall made the Supreme Court a full and equal branch of the federal government. In so doing, he joined Washington, his mentor, and Jefferson, his ideological rival, in the first rank of American founders. His legacy extends far beyond Marbury, which held for the first time that the Supreme Court has the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. Under his leadership, the Court upheld the constitutionality of a national bank, established the supremacy of the federal judiciary over state courts and legislatures in matters of constitutional interpretation, and profoundly influenced the economic development of the nation through vigorous interpretation of the contract and interstate commerce clauses. His major judicial opinions are eloquent public papers, written with the conviction that "clearness and precision are most essential qualities," and designed to inform and persuade the citizens of the new republic about the meaning and purpose of their Constitution. This volume collects 200 documents written between 1779 and 1835, including Marshall's most important judicial opinions, his influential rulings during the Aaron Burr treason trial, speeches, newspaper essays, and revealing letters to friends, fellow judges, and his beloved wife, Polly. It follows Marshall's varied career before becoming Chief Justice: as an officer in the Revolution, a supporter of the ratification of the Constitution, an envoy to France during the notorious "XYZ Affair," a congressman, and secretary of state in the Adams administration. The personal correspondence gathered here reveals the conviviality, good humor, and unpretentiousness that helped him unite the Court behind many of his landmark decisions, while selections from his biography of George Washington offer vivid descriptions of battles he fought in as a young man. Charles F. Hobson, editor, is the author of The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law. He is the editor of The Law Papers of St. George Tucker at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and was the editor of The Papers of John Marshall. "A marvelous and much-needed single-volume collection of the writings of America's greatest Chief Justice, selected by the scholar who knows him best." -Gordon Wood, author of Empire of LibertyLIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Writers on both sides of the American Civil War “brought to the crisis” (in editor J. D. McClatchys’ words) “poetry’s unique ability to stir the emotions, to freeze the moment, to sweep the scene with a panoramic lens and suddenly swoop in for a close-up of suffering or courage.” This vibrant collection brings together the most memorable and enduring work inspired by the conflict: the masterpieces of Whitman and Melville, Sidney Lanier on the death of Stonewall Jackson, the anti-slavery poems of Longfellow and Whittier, the front-line narratives of Henry Howard Brownell and John W. De Forest, the anthems of Julia Ward Howe and James Ryder Randall. Grief, indignation, pride, courage, patriotic fervor, ultimately reconciliation and healing: the poetry of the Civil War evokes unforgettably the emotions that roiled America in its darkest hour.About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

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Rediscover the adventure-pulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romance—now featuring an introduction by Junot Díaz In the spring of 1866, John Carter, a former Confederate captain prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, slips into a cave and is overcome by mysterious vapors. He awakes to find himself naked, alone, and forty-eight million miles from Earth—a castaway on the dying planet Mars. Taken prisoner by the Tharks, a fierce nomadic tribe of six-limbed, olive-green giants, he wins respect as a cunning and able warrior, who by grace of Mars’s weak gravity possesses the agility of a superman. He also wins the heart of fellow-prisoner Dejah Thoris, the alluring, red-skinned Princess of Helium, whose people he swears to defend against their grasping and ancient enemy, the city-state of Zodanga. John Carter first appeared in 1912 in the pages of The All-Story magazine and immediately entered the dream-life of American readers young and old. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s favorite among his many creations and remains a favorite of lovers of science fiction and fantasy everywhere.

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Describing his spiritual awakening amid the mountains and valleys of central California, John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra is, like Walden, one of the seminal texts in the literature of the American environment. It is presented here with an introduction by writer and activist Bill McKibben and related essays about Yosemite, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, and other wonders of the Sierra Nevada.

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