Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "Life on the Mississippi" is Mark Twain's most brilliant and most personal nonfictional work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War. A priceless collection of of humorous anecodotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain's...

This sequel to Garland's acclaimed autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, continues his story as he sets out for Chicago and settles into a Bohemian encampment of artists and writers. There he meets Zulime Taft, an artist who captures his heart and eventually becomes his wife. The intensity of this romance is rivaled only by Garland's struggle between America's coastal elite and his heartland roots. A Daughter of the Middle Border won the Pulitzer...

"The first authorized biography of a great American novelist"--

World famous at twenty-four, brilliant, reckless, and ultimately tragic, Stephen Crane is a dramatic study in contradictions. His most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage, is a classic antiwar novel, yet Crane himself longed for military honors. The son of a repressive Methodist minister who preached that reading novels was a vice, he used his literary stature to help defend a prostitute against the corrupt New York City police, which ruined his...

Mark Twain's works are a living national treasury, yet somehow, beneath the vast river of literature that he left behind, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man who became Mark Twain, has receded from view, leaving us with only faint and often trivialized remnants of his towering personality. Here, author Powers recreates the 19th century's vital landscapes and tumultuous events while restoring the human being at their center. Clemens left his frontier...

"Louisa May Alcott" portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her legendary character Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes, her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings, her experience as a nurse in the Civil War, the loss of her health and, sadly, her reliance on opiates in middle age. Stories and details culled from Alcott's journals,...

Stepping into the World of Mark Twain offers an exciting nonfiction reader that builds critical reading skills while students are immersed in engaging subject area content. This text is purposefully leveled to increase comprehension with different learner types. Stepping into the World of Mark Twain features complex and rigorous content appropriate for middle school students.

In this widely acclaimed biography, an outstanding Thoreau scholar presents the culmination of a lifetime of research. This eminently readable work reveals Thoreau's many-sidedness; famous and little-known incidents; encounters with Hawthorne, Whitman, other notables; much more. Fully corrected and enlarged by the author. Introduction. Map. Afterword. Bibliography. Index. 36 illustration.

From the publisher. Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of his experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth, and above all the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him. This new edition traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and considers the author in the context of his birthplace and sense of history -- social, economic, and...

Susan Cheever's comprehensive and definitive biography sheds new light on of life of Louisa May Alcott, whose work has inspired generations of women. Cheever laces this provocative biography with musings on the genesis of genius, and her identification with Jo March when she was a rebellious girl in the throes of puberty.