In a blending of fiction and fact, the author presents the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border area. He describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who struggle to survive on the family ranch that encompasses the meadow.

This comprehensive 1901 history spans the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, with a sharp regional focus on New England, the Middle States, and the South; it also contains in-depth critical biographies of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman.

Bigger, a young black man in Chicago, kills his first victim in a moment of panic. He then goes on to kill again. The book describes the feelings of freedom and identity Bigger gains from these acts.

One of the most renowned American poets of all time, Robert Frost (1874-1963) made plainspoken men and women eloquent philosophers on the human condition. “Selected Poems of Robert Frost” collects more than 100 poems by this master. It includes the full contents of Frost's first three volumes of poetry- “A Boy's Will”, “North of Boston”, and “Mountain Interval” -and other beloved poems like "Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken," and...

"Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years." "This story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage. And in a powerful, mesmerizing narrative,...

A roughhewn Kentucky egocentric wins international fame and fortune through his writing, though the other rewards of success seem to elude him.

Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man...

In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl," and Jack Kerouac's seminal book On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present the history of Beat Literature in his own inimitable way....