The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser was published as part of her 1938 volume U.S. 1. The poem, which is probably the most ambitious and least understood work of Depression-era American verse, commemorates the worst industrial accident in U.S. history, the Gauley Tunnel tragedy. In this terrible disaster, an undetermined number of men—likely somewhere between 700 and 800—died of acute silicosis, a lung disorder caused by prolonged inhalation of silica dust, af...

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modern...

American Poetry and the First World War connects American poetry to the political and economic forces behind American participation in World War I. Dayton investigates the ways that poetry was used to imagine the war and studies a wide range of poetry: open and closed form, formal and colloquial, well-known and unknown. In a chapter on Edith Wharton, Dayton demonstrates that many of the features of poetry also found expression in prose about the war. Seeing the war as the opening bid in Am...

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, exis...

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s — the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, ...

American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920 offers provocative new readings of authors whose innovations are recognized as inaugurating Modernism in US letters, including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Gathering the voices of both new and established scholars, the volume also reflects the diversity and contradictions of US literature of the 1910s. 'Literature' itself is construed variously, leading to explorations of jazz, t...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author's stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War.In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history. In The Vineyard of Liberty, he combines the color and texture of early American life with met...

"Bravo to Barbara Kellerman! Building upon a lifetime of scholarship and upon a popular course she has created at Harvard, Kellerman brings between the covers of a single volume the world's classic literature on leadership. Every thoughtful leader will find deep, rich rewards here." -- David Gergen, Director, Center for Public Leadership Harvard Kennedy School, Former Presidential AdviserBolster your leadership literacy—and improve your performance as a leader or manager.

What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it.Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big questions: Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are tol...

The second volume of Burns's acclaimed history of America, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great DepressionAbraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address pointed to a new way to preserve an old hope—that democracy might prove a vibrant and lasting form of government for people of different races, religions, and aspirations. The scars of the Civil War would not soon heal, but with that one short speech, the president held out the possibility that such a ...

As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.Even as the decline of the reading of literature, as argued by the National Endowment for the Arts, proceeds in our culture, Garber (“One of the most powerful women in the academic w...

Originally published in 1962, The Silence on the Shore is considered by many critics to be Hugh Garners best, most ambitious novel. Truly, in the person of Grace Hill, the landlady of the Toronto rooming house where most of the books events take place, Garner has created a fictional character never to be forgotten. Grace is a middle-aged snoop and an overweight nudist whose sexual release comes from watching wrestling matches at a hockey arena that is a thinly disguised Maple Leaf...