A biography that charts the boom and bust of America's first celebrity author, once Mark Twain's chief rival in American literature

In this first scholarly biography of Bret Harte in nearly seventy years, ...

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur (a.k.a. JoAnne Chesimard), and Elaine Brown are the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. In bearing witness to that ...

Although a rather shy, private man, William S. Burroughs gave a good many interviews during his lifetime, some in prominent publications, others in obscure forums. The interviews collected here provide ...

“The early history of New York is obscured in myth,” observed the pseudonymous author of “The Story of Manhattankind” in the first issue of The New Yorker (21 February 1925), “and to separate ...

Although best known for his novels The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles is also a short story writer, a poet, a respected translator, and a prolific essayist. In his ...

James Michener's vast work has intrigued millions of readers. Popularizing history, he wrote extensively about travel and covered broad areas of America in books such as Centennial, Texas, Hawaii, Alaska, ...

At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly insufficient." Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments of American ...

In 1917 when H. L. Mencken belittled the South as "almost as sterile artistically, intellectually and culturally as the Sahara Desert," he set off a reaction that is still reverberating today. The first ...

William Faulkner was not keen on giving interviews. More often than not, he refused, as when he wrote an aspiring interviewer in 1950, “Sorry but no. Am violently opposed to interviews and publicity. ...

Although he belonged to an American generation of writers deeply influenced by the high modernist revolt "against nature" and against the self-imposed limits of realism to a palpable world, William Faulkner ...