When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the great minds of early America.
When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the great minds of early America.
In December of 1862, having read his brother's name in a casualty list, Walt Whitman rushed from Brooklyn to the war front, where he found his brother wounded but recovering.
Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor.
For nearly three years, Walt Whitman immersed himself in the devastation of the Civil War, tending to thousands of wounded soldiers and recording his experiences with an immediacy and compassion unequaled in wartime literature anywhere in the world.
How did the stately, republican literary world of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper give way to the sensationalist, personality-saturated mass market society of the late nineteenth century?
The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters is a narrative and epistolary biography drawn from the unpublished lifelong correspondence exchanged among four brothers: Charles Chauncy, Edward Bliss, Ralph Waldo, and William Emerson.
Born in London in 1879 and raised in the Cape of Good Hope, Beatrice Hastings was one of those talented marginal figures who are major witnesses to their times, but whose testimony has been sadly neglected.
'Superb, beautifully written, touching and occasionally very funny' Andrew RobertsDavid Gilmour's superb biography of Rudyard Kipling is the first to show how the life and work of the great writer mirrored the trajectory of the British Empire, from its zenith to its final decades.
'A deeply intelligent and searching book, one that makes you re-consider the narrative of your own life and reframe the story you tell yourself' Hilary Mantel"e;There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims.
When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media--though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "e;a raw display of private life"e; by The New York Times Book Review.
From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes this long-awaited memoir recalling Chinua Achebe's personal experiences of and reflections on the Biafran War, one of Nigeria's most tragic civil warsChinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart, was a writer whose moral courage and storytelling gifts have left an enduring stamp on world literature.
Discover the heart-warming and uplifting story of a Glasgow tenement urchin finding her way against adversity Born during the Second World War in Glasgow, Christine Fraser was her mother's eighth child.
THE ACCLAIMED DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST BRITISH WRITERS OF ALL TIME Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a journalist, a father of ten, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all, a great novelist.
Evelyn Juers' extraordinary book is a unique imagining of the unconventional love affair between the writer and political activist Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger - a tall, blonde ex-barmaid twenty-seven years his junior - recounting their flight from Nazi Germany in 1933, to France and then to Los Angeles.
This new rebrand of MORE ABOUT BOY is a favourite book containing a wealth of new photos, facts and writings about Roald Dahl and his childhood, together with the original text and illustrations from his much-loved memoir.
Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history.
Published to coincide with the release of the film Bright Star, written and directed by Oscar Winner Jane Campion (The Piano, In the Cut), starring Abbie Cornish (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and Ben Whishaw (Brideshead Revisited, Perfume)John Keats died aged just twenty-five.
Jane Austen is the definitive biography of one of Britain's best-loved novelists, from the acclaimed author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman'As near perfect a life of Austen as we are likely to get: intelligent, feeling, suggestive' Carmen Callil, Daily Telegraph'Tomalin has written a biography that reflects Austen's own exacting standards, a book that radiates intelligence, wit and insight' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times'Of all the Austen biographies, this is the best .
'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination' - Keats, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in November 1817.
The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin is the acclaimed story of Nelly Ternan and Charles DickensWinner of the NCR Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize'This is the story of someone who - almost - wasn't there; who vanished into thin air.
'In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself'Intimate, vulnerable and unsparing, Reborn bears witness to the evolution of Susan Sontag.
While the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, Flora Thompson's much-loved portrait of life in the English countryside, has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself.
British poet Laurie Lee's celebrated autobiographical trilogy: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.
The pieces here span reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on Achebe's lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of 'Africa' for its own authorship.
