Charles Brockden Brown Three Gothic Novels Loa 103

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Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels (LOA #103)

Author : Charles Brockden Brown
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9781883011574
Total Pages : 946 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (115 download)

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Book Synopsis Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels (LOA #103) by : Charles Brockden Brown

Download or read book Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels (LOA #103) written by Charles Brockden Brown and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1998-08-01 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An elderly mystic dies of spontaneous combustion in a secret temple. A young man is haunted by voices instructing him to slaughter his wife and children. A sleepwalker undergoes a series of violent adventures in the wilderness. These haunted, dreamlike scenes define the fictional world of Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first professional novelist. Published in the final years of the eighteenth century, Brown’s startlingly prophetic novels are a virtual résumé of themes that would constantly recur in American literature: madness and murder, suicide and religious obsession, the seduction of innocence and the dangers of wilderness and settlement alike. In Three Gothic Novels, The Library of America collects the most significant of Brown’s works. Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), his novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, is often considered his masterpiece. A relentlessly dark exploration of guilt, deception, and compulsion, it creates a sustained mood of irrational terror in the midst of the Pennsylvania countryside. In Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), Brown draws on his own experience to create indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, while telling the story of a young man caught in the snares of a professional swindler. Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) fuses traditional Gothic themes with motifs drawn from the American wilderness, in a series of eerily unreal adventures that test the limits of the protagonist’s self-knowledge. All three novels reveal Brown as the pioneer of a major vein of American writing, a novelist whose literary heirs include Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and the whole tradition of horror and noir from Cornell Woolrich to Stephen King. This volume also includes a newly researched chronology of Brown’s life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts. 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.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels (LOA #4)

Author : Harriet Beecher Stowe
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450011
Total Pages : 1508 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels (LOA #4) by : Harriet Beecher Stowe

Download or read book Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels (LOA #4) written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1982-05-06 with total page 1508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Library of America volume are the best and most enduring works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “the little woman,” as Abraham Lincoln said when he met her in 1861, “who wrote the book that made this great war.” He was referring, with rueful exaggeration, to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which during its first year had sold over 300,000 copies. Contemporary readers can still appreciate the powerful effects of its melodramatic characterizations and its unapologetic sentimentality. They can also recognize in its treatment of racial violence some of the brooding imagination and realism that anticipates Faulkner’s rendering of the same theme. Stowe was charged with exaggerating the evils of slavery, but her stay in Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father (the formidable Lyman Beecher, head of the Lane Theological Seminary) gave her a close look at the miseries of the slave communities across the Ohio River. People in her circle of friends were continually harboring slaves who escaped across the river from Kentucky on the way, they hoped, to Canada. Two other novels, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, show the range and variety of her literary accomplishment. The Minister’s Wooing (1859) is set in Newport, Rhode Island, after the Revolution. It is a romance based in part on the life of Stowe’s sister, and it traces to a happy ending the conflicts in a young woman between adherence to Calvinistic rigor and her expression of preference in the choice of a marital partner. The third novel, Oldtown Folks (1869), confirms Stowe’s genius for the realistic rendering of ordinary experience, her talent for social portraiture with a keen satiric edge, and her subtlety in exploring a wide group of themes, from child-rearing practices and religious controversy to romantic seduction and betrayal. But finally, it is the old town and a way of life that no longer exists that is the true subject of this elegiac novel. 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.

Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories (LOA #235)

Author : Sherwood Anderson
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 1598532219
Total Pages : 928 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories (LOA #235) by : Sherwood Anderson

Download or read book Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories (LOA #235) written by Sherwood Anderson and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2012-12-27 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the winter of 1912, Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) abruptly left his office and spent three days wandering through the Ohio countryside, a victim of “nervous exhaustion.” Over the next few years, abandoning his family and his business, he resolved to become a writer. Novels and poetry followed, but it was with the story collection Winesburg, Ohio that he found his ideal form, remaking the American short story for the modern era. Hart Crane, one of the first to recognize Anderson’s genius, quickly hailed his accomplishment: “America should read this book on her knees.” Here––for the first time in a single volume––are all the collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Exploring the hidden recesses of small town life, these haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories pivot on seemingly quiet moments when lives change, futures are recast, and pasts come to reckon. They transformed the tone of American storytelling, inspiring writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, and defining a tradition of midwestern fiction that includes Charles Baxter, editor of this volume. 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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10)

Author : Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450080
Total Pages : 1308 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10) by : Nathaniel Hawthorne

Download or read book Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10) written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1983-04-15 with total page 1308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in a richly suggestive style, Hawthorne’s five world-famous novels are permeated by his own history as well as America’s In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era. Considered Hawthorne’s greatest work, The Scarlet Letter is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. The transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, the innate lawlessness of their bastard child Pearl, and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world. Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar’s love for a merchant’s daughter. The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922 (LOA #117)

Author : Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 1883011841
Total Pages : 1120 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922 (LOA #117) by : Jackson R. Bryer

Download or read book F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922 (LOA #117) written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2000-08-28 with total page 1120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the outset of what he called "the greatest, the gaudiest spree in history," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the works that brought him instant fame, mastering the glittering aphoristic prose and keen social observation that would distinguish all his writing. This Library of America volume brings together four volumes that collectively offer the fullest literary expression of one of the most fascinating eras in American life. This Side of Paradise (1920) gave Fitzgerald the early success that defined and haunted him for the rest of his career. Offering in its Princeton chapters the most enduring portrait of college life in American literature, this lyrical novel records the ardent and often confused longings of its hero's struggles to find love and to formulate a philosophy of life. Flappers and Philosophers (1920), a collection of accomplished short stories, includes such classics as "Dalyrimple Goes Wrong," "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and "The Ice Palace." Fitzgerald continues his dissection of a self-destructive era in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), as the self-styled aristocrat Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria, are cut off from an inheritance and forced to endure the excruciating dwindling of their fortune. Here New York City, playground for the pleasure-loving Patches and brutal mirror of their dissipation, is portrayed more vividly than anywhere else in Fitzgerald's work. Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), his second collection of stories, includes the novella "May Day," featuring interlocking tales of debutantes, soldiers, and socialists brought together in the uncertain aftermath of World War I, and "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz," a fable in which the excesses of the Jazz Age take the hallucinatory form of a palace of unfathomable opulence hidden deep in the Montana Rockies. 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.

Henry James: Novels 1896-1899 (LOA #139)

Author : Henry James
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 1931082308
Total Pages : 1054 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Henry James: Novels 1896-1899 (LOA #139) by : Henry James

Download or read book Henry James: Novels 1896-1899 (LOA #139) written by Henry James and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2003-03-10 with total page 1054 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Library of America volume collects four novels written by Henry James in the period immediately following his unsuccessful five-year-long attempt to establish himself as a playwright on the London stage. Hoping to convert his “infinite little loss” into “infinite little gain,” James returned to the novelistic examination of English society with a new appreciation for what he called the “divine principle of the Scenario,” “a key that, working in the same general way fits the complicated chambers of both the dramatic and the narrative lock.” His continued interest in dramatic form is demonstrated in The Other House (1896), which was derived from the scenario for a three-act play. Set in two neighboring houses and told mostly through dialogue, the novel explores the violent and tragic consequences of jealousy and frustrated passion. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), one of the most tightly constructed of James’s late novels, a house and its exquisite antique furnishings and artwork become the source of a protracted struggle involving the proud and imperious Mrs. Gereth, her amiable son, Owen, his philistine fiancée, Mona Brigstock, and the sensitive Fleda Vetch, whose moral judgment is tested by her conflicting allegiances. What Maisie Knew (1897) explores with perception and sensitivity the effect upon a young girl of her parents’ bitter divorce and their subsequent remarriages. In writing the novel James chose as his point of view what he described as “the consciousness, the dim, sweet, scared, wondering, clinging perception of the child.” The Awkward Age (1899) examines the complicated relations among the members of a sophisticated London social circle almost entirely through dialogue as it depicts the shifting marital prospects of a young woman poised on the verge of adult life. Both of these novels insightfully explore the ambiguity of childhood “innocence” amid adult struggles over money, power, and love. 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.

Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162)

Author : Henry James
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9781931082884
Total Pages : 754 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (828 download)

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Book Synopsis Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162) by : Henry James

Download or read book Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162) written by Henry James and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2006-02-02 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces Writing 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.

William Dean Howells: Novels 1875-1886 (LOA #8)

Author : William Dean Howells
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450042
Total Pages : 1300 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis William Dean Howells: Novels 1875-1886 (LOA #8) by : William Dean Howells

Download or read book William Dean Howells: Novels 1875-1886 (LOA #8) written by William Dean Howells and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1982-11-01 with total page 1300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four novels collected in this Library of America volume are among the classic works from the immensely productive career of America’s most influential man of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. William Dean Howells was a champion of French and Russian realistic writers and a brilliant advocate of the most controversial American writers of his own time. In A Foregone Conclusion (1875), a young American painter roams through Europe for years before at last deciding to marry the woman who, he erroneously thinks, has been in love with an Italian priest turned agnostic. A Modern Instance (1882) offers an unflinching portrait of an unhappy marriage and ends with a hero barred by his perhaps overscrupulous conscience from marrying the divorced heroine. Once again personal dilemmas are seen as symptoms of the rapid displacement of older social and religious stabilities by opportunism and commercial progress. One of the most engaging of all his novels, Indian Summer(1885), is touched with the Jamesian glamour of romantic confusion among two American couples in Italy. Here Howells’s realism takes a quietly humorous turn. Situations which might be exploited by another novelist for their theatrical or melodramatic possibilities are instead eroded by the often trivial or casual experiences of everyday living. Characteristically, Howells is opposed to exaggeration in the interest of discovering how people, despite the crises that beset them, manage to find their way. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells’s best-known work, gives a brilliantly skeptical portrait of American business life and its perils, celebrating not the rise but the loss of fortune that makes possible the hero’s recovery of his earlier integrity and happiness. “There are,” remarked a contemporary reviewer, “thousands of Silas Laphams throughout the United States,” and present-day readers might agree that there still are. 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.

Jack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7)

Author : Jack London
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450066
Total Pages : 1238 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Jack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7) by : Jack London

Download or read book Jack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7) written by Jack London and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1982-11-01 with total page 1238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London’s own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled “Revolution.” London’s prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined “the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.” Whether he is recollecting, in The Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir John Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it. Though he is outraged in The People of the Abyss by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, The Call of the Wild (in the companion volume, Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London’s warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force. 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.

Slave Narratives (LOA #114)

Author : William L. Andrews
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9781883011765
Total Pages : 1066 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (117 download)

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Book Synopsis Slave Narratives (LOA #114) by : William L. Andrews

Download or read book Slave Narratives (LOA #114) written by William L. Andrews and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2000-01-15 with total page 1066 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage. Included in the volume: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw; Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; The Confessions of Nat Turner; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Narrative of William W. Brown; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb; Narrative of Sojouner Truth; Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of J. D.Green. 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.

Washington Irving: History, Tales & Sketches (LOA #16)

Author : Washington Irving
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450141
Total Pages : 1198 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Washington Irving: History, Tales & Sketches (LOA #16) by : Washington Irving

Download or read book Washington Irving: History, Tales & Sketches (LOA #16) written by Washington Irving and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1983-11-15 with total page 1198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington Irving’s career as a writer began obscurely at age seventeen, when his brother’s newspaper published his series of comic reports on the theater, theater-goers, fashions, balls, courtships, duels, and marriages of his contemporary New York, called Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. Written in the persona of an elderly gentleman of the old school, these letters captured his fellow townsmen at play in their most incongruous attitudes of simple sophistication. Irving’s next work, Salmagundi, written in collaboration with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding, and published at irregular intervals in 1805–06, continued this roguish style of satire and burlesque. A History of New York, publicized by an elaborate hoax in the local newspapers concerning the disappearance of the elderly “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” turned out to be a wild and hilarious spoof that combined real New York history with political satire. Quickly reprinted in England, it was admired by Walter Scott and Charles Dickens (who carried his copy in his pocket). In later years, as Irving revised and re-revised his History, he softened his gibes at Thomas Jefferson, the Dutch, and the Yankees of New England; this Library of America volume presents the work in its original, exuberant, robust, and unexpurgated form, giving modern readers a chance to enjoy the version that brought him immediate international acclaim. The Sketch Book contains Irving’s two best-loved stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It also includes many sketches of English country and city life, as well as nostalgic portraits of vanishing traditions, like the old celebrations of Christmas. A writer of great urbanity and poise, acutely sensitive to the nostalgia of a passing age, Washington Irving was a central figure in America’s emergence on the international scene. 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.

Mark Twain: Historical Romances (LOA #71)

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450820
Total Pages : 1068 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (58 download)

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Book Synopsis Mark Twain: Historical Romances (LOA #71) by : Mark Twain

Download or read book Mark Twain: Historical Romances (LOA #71) written by Mark Twain and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1994-08-01 with total page 1068 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the three novels collected in this Library of America volume, Mark Twain turned his comic genius to a period that fascinated and repelled him in equal measure: medieval and Renaissance Europe. This lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendor and abysmal ignorance—the seeming opposite of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic nineteenth-century America—engaged Twain’s imagination, inspiring a children’s classic, and astonishing fantasy of comedy and violence, and an unusual fictional biography. Twain drew on his fascination with impersonation and the theme of the double in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), which brilliantly uses the device of identical boys from opposite ends of the social hierarchy to evoke the tumultuous contrasts of Henry VIII’s England. As the pauper Tom Canty is raised to the throne, while the rightful heir is cast out among thieves and beggars, Twain sustains one of his most compelling narratives. A perennial children’s favorite, the novel brings an impassioned American point of view to the injustices of traditional European society. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) finds Twain in high satiric form. When hard-headed Yankee mechanic Hank Morgan is knocked out in a fight, he wakes up in Camelot in A.D. 528—and finds himself pitted against the medieval rituals and superstitions of King Arthur and his knights. In a hilarious burlesque of the age of chivalry and of its cult in the nineteenth-century American South, Twain demolishes knighthood’s romantic aura to reveal a brutish, violent society beset by ignorance. But the comic mood gives way to a darker questioning of both ancient and modern society, culminating in an astonishing apocalyptic conclusion that questions both American progress and Yankee “ingenuity” as Camelot is undone by the introduction of advanced technology. “Taking into account . . . her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquest in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever known.” So Twain wrote of the heroine of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), his most elaborate work of historical reconstruction. A respectful and richly detailed chronicle, by turns admiring and indignant, Joan of Arc opens a fascinating window onto the moral imagination of America’s greatest comic writer. 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.

Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5)

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450073
Total Pages : 1190 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5) by : Mark Twain

Download or read book Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5) written by Mark Twain and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1982-11-01 with total page 1190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, together in one volume for the first time. Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery. 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.

Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (LOA #76)

Author : Thomas Paine
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9781883011031
Total Pages : 944 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (LOA #76) by : Thomas Paine

Download or read book Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (LOA #76) written by Thomas Paine and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1995-03-01 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Paine was the impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, and this volume brings together his best-known works: Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, along with a selection of letters, articles and pamphlets that emphasizes Paine's American years. “I know not whether any man in the world,” wrote John Adams in 1805, “has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.” The impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, Paine wrote for his mass audience with vigor, clarity, and “common sense.” This Library of America volume is the first major new edition of his work in 50 years, and the most comprehensive single-volume collection of his writings available. Paine came to America in 1774 at age 37 after a life of obscurity and failure in England. Within fourteen months he published Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet for the American Revolution, and began a career that would see him prosecuted in England, imprisoned and nearly executed in France, and hailed and reviled in the American nation he helped create. In Common Sense, Paine set forth an inspiring vision of an independent America as an asylum for freedom and an example of popular self-government in a world oppressed by despotism and hereditary privilege. The American Crisis, begun during “the times that try men’s souls” in 1776, is a masterpiece of popular pamphleteering in which Paine vividly reports current developments, taunts and ridicules British adversaries, and enjoins his readers to remember the immense stakes of their struggle. Among the many other items included in the volume are the combative “Forester” letters, written in a reply to a Tory critic of Common Sense, and several pieces concerning the French Revolution, including an incisive argument against executing Louis XVI. Rights of Man (1791–1792), written in response to Edmund Burke’s attacks on the French Revolution, is a bold vision of an egalitarian society founded on natural rights and unbound by tradition. Paine’s detailed proposal for government assistance to the poor inspired generations of subsequent radicals and reformers. The Age of Reason (1794–1795), Paine’s most controversial work, is an unrestrained assault on the authority of the Bible and a fervent defense of the benevolent God of deism. Included in this volume are a detailed chronology of Paine’s life, informative notes, an essay on the complex printing history of Paine’s work, and an index. 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.

Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry (LOA #18)

Author : Stephen Crane
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450172
Total Pages : 1422 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry (LOA #18) by : Stephen Crane

Download or read book Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry (LOA #18) written by Stephen Crane and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1984-08-15 with total page 1422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here in one volume are all of Stephen Crane's best-known works, including the novels The Red Badge of Courage, about a young and confused Union soldier under fire for the first time; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a vivid portrait of slum life and a young girl's fall; George's Mother, about New York's Bowery and its effect on a young workingman; The Third Violet, about a bohemian artist's country romance; and The Monster, a novella about sacrifice and rescue. The stories collected here include masterpieces like "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," and "The Bride Comes to the Yellow Sky," as well as tales of childhood in small-town America. In his journalism, the best of which is presented here, Crane covered the Spanish-American and Grego-Turkish wars, traveled through Mexico and the West, and reported on the seamier sides of New York City life. The volume concludes with The Black Riders and War Is Kind, collections of epigrammatic free verse that look back to Emily Dickinson and forward to Imagism. 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.

Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales (LOA #19)

Author : Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 1598533878
Total Pages : 1440 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales (LOA #19) by : Edgar Allan Poe

Download or read book Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales (LOA #19) written by Edgar Allan Poe and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 1440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Library of America presents “the first truly dependable collection of Poe’s poetry and tales”—featuring well-known works like ‘The Raven’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, plus a selection of rarely published writings (New York Review of Books). Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry is famous both for the musicality of “To Helen” and “The City in the Sea” and for the hypnotic, incantatory rhythms of “The Raven” and “Ulalume.” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado” show his mastery of Gothic horror; “The Pit and the Pendulum” is a classic of terror and suspense. Poe invented the modern detective story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and developed the form of science fiction that was to influence, among others, Jules Verne and Thomas Pynchon. Poe was also adept at the humorous sketch of playful jeu d'esprit, such as “X-ing a Paragraph” or “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” All his stories reveal his high regard for technical proficiency and for what he called “rationation.” Poe’s fugitive early poems, stories rarely collected (such as “Bon-Bon,” “King Pest,” “Mystification,” and “The Duc De L'Omelette”), his only attempt at drama, “Politian”—these and much more are included in this comprehensive collection, presented chronologically to show Poe’s development toward Eureka: A Prose Poem, his culminating vision of an indeterminate universe, printed here for the first time as Poe revised it and intended it should stand. A special feature of this volume is the care taken to select an authoritative text of each work. The printing and publishing history of every item has been investigated in order to choose a version that incorporates all of Poe’s own revisions without reproducing the errors or changes introduced by later editors. Here, then, is one of America’s and the world's most disturbing, powerful, and inventive writers. 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.

Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs & Selected Letters (LOA #50)

Author : Ulysses S. Grant
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 9780940450585
Total Pages : 1228 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (55 download)

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Book Synopsis Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs & Selected Letters (LOA #50) by : Ulysses S. Grant

Download or read book Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs & Selected Letters (LOA #50) written by Ulysses S. Grant and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1990-10-01 with total page 1228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years after Appomattox, stricken by cancer and facing financial ruin, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs to secure his family’s future. in doing so, the Civil War’s greatest general won himself a unique place in American letters. His character, intelligence, sense of purpose, and simple compassion are evident throughout this vivid and deeply moving account, which has been acclaimed by readers as diverse asMark Twain, Matthew Arnold, Gertrude Stein, and Edmund Wilson. Annotated and complete with detailed maps, battle plans, and facsimiles reproduced from the original edition, this volume offers an unparalleled vantage on the most terrible, moving, and inexhaustibly fascinating event in American history. included are 174 letters, many of them to his wife, Julia, which offer an intimate view of their affectionate and enduring marriage. 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.