From hard scrabble origins on the Plains of North Dakota, to longshoremen organizing on Manhattan’s West Side docks, to living the life of a Bohemian poet in Los Angeles and beyond, Thomas McGrath’s literary aspirations took him far from his humble beginnings.For over six decades, McGrath created poems based largely on the themes of love, work, and political justice. His love of the prairie and his early years on a working farm were central to his life. The virtues of the agrarian communit...

Renaissance diplomat and part-time spy, William Hakluyt was also England's first serious geographer, gathering together a wealth of accounts about the wide-ranging travels and discoveries of the sixteenth-century English. One of the epics of this great period of expansion, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation describes, in the words of the explorers themselves, an astonishing era in which the English grew rapidly aware of the sheer size and s...