The plants and landscape at Rowan Oak are the “little postage stamp of soil” that William Faulkner owned, walked, and tended for over thirty years during the writing of many of his short stories and novels. Faulkner saw and smelled the earth and listened to sounds from the cultivated grounds and the surrounding woods. This is the place that offered him refuge for writing and provided him food from its garden, fruit and nut trees, and pasture for his horses and a milk cow. Rowan Oak boasts ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and Damned" offers a poignant exploration of the disillusionment and moral decay of American society during the Jazz Age. Through the tumultuous lives of its protagonists, Anthony and Gloria Patch, the novel unfolds in a richly evocative style that blends lyrical prose with sharp social commentary. Fitzgerald masterfully captures the glimmering allure and underlying emptiness of the Roaring Twenties, illuminating the struggles of a generation enamored w...

"Vonnegut's life was a fascinating tragicomedy worthy of his best novels . . . A superbly researched and above all very entertaining biography." —Blake Bailey, New York Times–bestselling author of Philip Roth: The BiographyA New York Times Notable BookA Washington Post Notable Nonfiction BookIn 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned bio...

Though he died more than forty years ago, James Thurber remains one of America's greatest and most enduring humorists, and his books -- for both adults and children -- remain as popular as ever. In this comprehensive collection of his letters -- the majority of which have never before been published -- we find unsuspected insights into his life and career.His prodigious body of work -- fables, drawings, comic essays, reportage, short stories, including his famous "The Secret Life of...

Writers On The Edge offers a range of essays, memoirs and poetry written by majorcontemporary authors who bring fresh insight into the dark world of addiction, from drugsand alcohol, to sex, gambling and food. Editors Diana Raab and James Brown have assembled anarray of talented and courageous writers who share their stories with heartbreaking honesty asthey share their obsessions as well as the awe-inspiring power of hope and redemption.“Open to any piece in this collecti...

LIGHTS I HAVE SEEN BEFOREThe children are off somewhereand when I wakenI hear onlythe buzz of currentin the TVand the refrigeratorgroaning against the comingday. I rise and wash;there is nothingto think of exceptthe insistent pushof water, and the pipe's

From Archibald MacLeish to David Sedaris, radio storytelling has long borrowed from the world of literature, yet the narrative radio work of well-known writers and others is a story that has not been told before. And when the literary aspects of specific programs such as The War of the Worlds or Sorry, Wrong Number were considered, scrutiny was superficial. In Lost Sound, Jeff Porter examines the vital interplay between acoustic techniques and modernist practices...

With contributions ranging over three centuries, Culture, Capital and Representation explores how literature, cultural studies and the visual arts represent, interact with, and produce ideas about capital, whether in its early phases (the growth of stock markets) or in its late phase (global speculative capital).

“We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.” Mexico, an escape route, inspiration, and ecstatic terminus of the celebrated novel On the Road, was crucial to Jack Kerouac’s creative development. In this dramatic and highly compelling account, Jorge García-Robles, leading authority on the Beats in Mexico, re-creates both the actual events and the literary imaginings of Kerouac in what became the writer’s revelatory terrai...

This book examines the connections between two disparate yet persistently bound thematics -- mobility and intoxication -- and explores their central yet frequently misunderstood role in constructing subjectivity following the 1960s. Emerging from profound mid-twentieth-century changes in how drugs and travel were imagined, the conceptual nexus discussed sheds new light on British and North American responses to sixties counterculture. With readings of Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Alex...

In this revisionary study, Barbara Foley challenges prevalent myths about left-wing culture in the Depression-era U.S. Focusing on a broad range of proletarian novels and little-known archival material, the author recaptures an important literature and rewrites a segment of American cultural history long obscured and distorted by the anti-Communist bias of contemporaries and critics.Josephine Herbst, William Attaway, Jack Conroy, Thomas Bell and Tillie Olsen, are among the radical w...

"Does an admirable job of examining Capote as a writer whose work reflects America of the late 1940s and 1950s more deeply than previously thought." —Ralph F. Voss, author of Truman Capote and the Legacy of "In Cold Blood"Truman Capote—and his most famous works, In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's—continue to have a powerful hold over the American popular imagination, along with his glamorous lifestyle, which included hobnobbing with...