Download or read book William James Writings 1902 1910 LOA 38 written by William James and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1988-02-01 with total page 1410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher and psychologist William James was the best known and most influential American thinker of his time. The five books and nineteen essays collected in this Library of America volume represent all his major work from 1902 until his death in 1910. Most were originally written as lectures addressed to general audiences as well as philosophers and were received with great enthusiasm. His writing is clear, energetic, and unpretentious, and is marked by the devotion to literary excellence he shared with his brother, Henry James. In these works William James champions the value of individual experience with an eloquence and enthusiasm that has placed him alongside Emerson and Whitman as a classic exponent of American democratic culture. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James explores “the very inner citadel of human life” by focusing on intensely religious individuals of different cultures and eras. With insight, compassion, and open-mindedness, he examines and assesses their beliefs, seeking to measure religion’s value by its contributions to individual human lives. In Pragmatism (1907) James suggests that the conflicting metaphysical positions of “tender-minded” rationalism and “tough-minded” empiricism be judged by examining their actual consequences. Philosophy, James argues, should free itself from unexamined principles and closed systems and confront reality with complete openness. In A Pluralistic Universe (1909) James rejects the concept of the absolute and calls on philosophers to respond to “the real concrete sensible flux of life.” Through his discussion of Kant, Hegel, Henri Bergson, and religion, James explores a universe viewed not as an abstract “block” but as a rich “manyness-in-oneness,” full of independent yet connected events. The Meaning of Truth (1909) is a polemical collection of essays asserting that ideas are made true not by inherent qualities but by events. James delights in intellectual combat, stating his positions with vigor while remaining open to opposing ideas. Some Problems of Philosophy (1910) was intended by James to serve both as a historical overview of metaphysics and as a systematic statement of his philosophical beliefs. Though unfinished at his death, it fully demonstrates the psychological insight and literary vividness James brought to philosophy. Among the essays included are the anti-imperialist “Address on the Philippine Question,” “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” a candid personal account of the 1906 California disaster, and “The Moral Equivalent of War,” a call for the redirection of martial energies to peaceful ends, as well as essays on Emerson, the role of university in intellectual life, and psychic research. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Henry James Novels 1901 1902 LOA 162 written by Henry James and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2006-02-02 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel. James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Writings 1878 1899 written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 1212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selection of writings by philosopher, psychologist, and champion of religious pluralism William James, including "The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy," "Psychology: Briefer Course," and ten other essays.

Download or read book Ring Lardner Stories Other Writings LOA 244 written by Ring Lardner and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 1274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of the Jazz Age, Ring Lardner was America’s most beloved humorist, equally admired by a popular audience and by literary friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. A sports writer who became a sensation with his comic baseball bestseller, You Know Me Al, Lardner had a rare gift for inspired nonsense and an ear attuned to the rhythms and hilarious oddities of American speech. He was also a sharp and dispassionate observer of the American scene. His best stories—among them such masterpieces as “Haircut,” “The Golden Honeymoon,” “A Caddy’s Diary,” and “The Love Nest”—cast a devastating eye on the hypocrisies, prejudices, and petty scheming of everyday life. In this Library of America edition, editor Ian Frazier surveys the whole sweep of Lardner’s talents, offering contemporary readers his finest stories, the full texts of You Know Me Al, The Big Town, and the long out-of-print The Real Dope, and a generous sampling of his humor pieces, sports reporting, song lyrics, and surrealist playlets. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Writings 1878 1899 written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 1212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William James, a member of America's most illustrious intellectual family, is widely acclaimed as the country's foremost philosopher, the first of its psychologists, and a champion of religious pluralism. As the apostle of pragmatism, his influence on American thought is as strong now as it has ever been. James's emphasis on the creative power of faith, will, and action, his opening up of philosophy to the fresh air of ordinary experience, his fascination with alternative forms of belief and states of consciousness, and his impatience with dogmas of any kind--all make him a defender of individual experience, and earn him a place beside Emerson and Whitman as an exponent of American democratic culture. In this volume are the brilliant, engagingly written works of James's early and middle years. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy advances the liberating argument that each of us has the right to believe in hypotheses that are not susceptible to proof and that such beliefs might actually change the world. The conversational style of these essays reflects their origin in public lectures, as well as James's conviction that truth can be discovered as much in the course of everyday life as in the activities of science or of philosophical speculation. Talks to Teachers and to Students, also drawn from lectures, helped transform the emerging science of education. Here James applies his new psychology to classroom theory and conduct, especially for the primary grades. This immensely influential book has never gone out of print. It emphasizes the role in learning of instinct, play, and habit, along with the importance of engaging the voluntary interests of students. James's warm and sympathetic nature informs his treatment of children, who can best be taught by those who respect the child's autonomy and who avoid what he calls "hammering in." Psychology: Briefer Course is far more than a shortened version of his monumental Principles of Psychology. It significantly revises parts of the earlier work and adds important new materials. (Students liked to call the longer book "James" and the shorter one "Jimmy".) James's new psychology moved away from discussions of the soul, morality, and logic, and focused instead on instinct, will, and the importance of action and habit. Passages comparing human consciousness to "a wonderful stream" inspired the "stream of consciousness" in the future work of Joyce, Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, a student of James's at Harvard. "Human Immortality," which defends the possibility of life after death, and eight more of James's most important essays round out this second volume devoted to a writer who was called by John Dewey "almost a Columbus of the inner world."

Download or read book May Swenson Collected Poems LOA 239 written by May Swenson and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often compared to the works of E.E. Cummings and Elizabeth Bishop, these poems are a free-ranging exploration of outer and inner worlds, of nature and the human mind In celebration of the centenary of May Swenson’s birth, The Library of America presents a one-volume edition of all of the poems that Swenson published in her lifetime—from her first collection Another Animal (1954) to the innovative shaped poems of Iconographs (1970) to her final work In Other Words (1987)—as well as a selection of previously uncollected work. The collection reveals the sweeping compass of Swenson’s curiosity: nature poems display her keen observation of wildlife; exuberant and erotic love poems celebrate beauty and passion; place poems record her travels to the American Southwest, France, and Italy and her residence in New York City and Sea Cliff, Long Island; verse “analyses” investigate baseball, wave motion, the DNA molecule, bronco busting, James Bond movies, and the first walk on the moon. Swenson was an inveterate reviser: poems in earlier volumes were frequently reworked for inclusion in later volumes, such as To Mix with Time (1963) and New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978). While preserving the order of publication, this volume presents the author’s final or definitive version. Substantive textual variants and title changes are detailed in the notes to the volume. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Jonathan Edwards Writings from the Great Awakening LOA 245 written by Jonathan Edwards and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of writings from and about New England’s Great Awakening—a spiritual movement that gave rise to American evangelicalism—from the theologian and philosopher who first reported it to the masses Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is recognized today as a great theologian and philosopher. In his own day Edwards was best known as a leader of what is now known as the Great Awakening: a series of small-town revivals that mushroomed into a movement credited with giving birth to American evangelicalism and laying the groundwork for the American Revolution. In authoritative texts drawn from first editions and manuscript sources, this volume brings together all of Edwards’s essential writings from and about the revivals, including the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and his vivid Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundreds of Souls, the work that first publicized the awakenings. Characterized by precise logic and powerful imagery, his writing continues to inspire students and spiritual seekers alike. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book The American Revolution Writings from the War of Independence 1775 1783 LOA 123 written by Various and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive collection of writings from the War of Independence poses a “subtle but profound challenge to much that we think we know about the founders and their era” (Los Angeles Times) Drawn from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, public declarations, contemporary narratives, and private memoranda, this Library of America volume brings together over 120 pieces by more than seventy participants and eyewitnesses to create a unique literary panorama of the War of Independence. Beginning with Paul Revere’s own narrative of his legendary ride in April 1775 and ending with a moving account of George Washington’s resignation from the command of the Continental Army in December 1783, the volume contains writing that describes the major events of the conflict—the early battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill; the failed American invasion of Canada; the 1776 campaign in New York and New Jersey; the crucial battle of Saratoga; the bitter fighting in the South and along the western frontier; and the decisive triumph at Yorktown. Included are writings by famous figures—Washington Franklin, Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, John and Abigail Adams—and by lesser known participants: Samuel Blachley Webb describing courage and panic at Bunker Hill; Sarah Hodgkins writing longingly to her absent soldier husband; Jabez Fitch recounting the last hours of a wounded American officer in Brooklyn; Albigence Waldo chronicling the privations and miseries of Valley Forge; Otho Holland Williams recording with appealing candor American defeats and victories in South Carolina. The volume also contains writings by American Loyalists and by British officers and officials serving in America that provide provocative insights into the losing side of an epochal conflict. All selections are written by people who were in America at the time of the conflict. The American Revolution also includes a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory notes, and an index.

Download or read book William Wells Brown Clotel Other Writings LOA 247 written by William Wells Brown and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2014-02-20 with total page 1420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A showcase of the extraordinary career America’s first Black novelist and pivotal figure in African American literature “It is difficult to imagine any one of his contemporaries who contributed as much or as richly to so many genres.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr. Born a slave and kept functionally illiterate until he escaped at age nineteen, William Wells Brown (1814–1884) refashioned himself first as an agent of the Underground Railroad, then as an antislavery activist and self-taught orator, and finally as the author of a series of landmark works that made him, like Frederick Douglass, a foundational figure of African American literature. His controversial novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), a fictionalized account of the lives and struggles of Thomas Jefferson’s black daughters and granddaughters, is the first novel written by an African American. This Library of America volume brings it together with Brown’s other groundbreaking works: Narrative of William W. Brown: A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847), his first published book and an immediate bestseller, which describes his childhood, life in slavery, and eventual escape; later memoirs charting his life during the Civil War and Reconstruction; the first play (The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, 1858), travelogue (The American Fugitive in Europe, 1855), and history (The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, 1862) written by an African American; and eighteen speeches and public letters from the 1840s, 50s, and 60s, many collected here for the first time. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Henry James Travel Writings Vol 2 LOA 65 written by Henry James and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1993-09-01 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry James’s travel writings are at once literary masterpieces, unsurpassed guidebooks and penetrating reflections on the international themes familiar from his fiction. This volume, the second of two, begins with the classic A Little Tour in France (1900), illustrated with Joseph Pennell’s exquisite drawings from the original edition. James begins his tour of the French countryside one rainy morning in mid-September of 1882, when he sets off for the city of Tours as a means of exploring the proposition that “though France might be Paris, Paris was by no means France.” From Tours, Balzac’s birthplace, James travels to the great chateaux of the Loire Valley, visiting Chambord, Amboise, Chenonceaux, and Blois, where, as you cross the threshold, “you step straight into the sunshine and storm of the French Renaissance.” Dense with literary associations and historical echoes, James’s prose brings castles and cathedrals and old walled towns to life. In his glancingly precise visual evocations of terrain and cityscape, he realizes his ambition “to sketch without a palette or brushes.” Henry James loved Italy, “a beautiful disheveled nymph” to England’s “good married matron.” The incisive and witty essays in Italian Hours (1909) describe memorably happy sojourns in Venice, Rome, and Florence, and excursions to Siena, Assisi, Perugia, Capri, Ravenna, and other Italian cities. “Nowhere do art and life seem so interfused” as in Venice, wrote James in celebration of the splendor of Venetian light and color, air, and history. He records his radiant impressions of Roman churches and aqueducts, museums and fountains, and rambles through the gardens of the Villa Borghese in spring, when Rome seems lighted “with an irresistible smile.” All these essays are filled with James’s intense pleasure in Italian places and people. This volume concludes with sixteen essays on such varied places as Switzerland, Holland, Rheims, and the Pyrénées, including a memorable account of the American volunteer ambulance corps in Europe during World War One. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Writings 1902 1910 written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 1379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book William Dean Howells Novels 1875 1886 LOA 8 written by William Dean Howells and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1982-11-01 with total page 1300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four novels collected in this Library of America volume are among the classic works from the immensely productive career of America’s most influential man of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. William Dean Howells was a champion of French and Russian realistic writers and a brilliant advocate of the most controversial American writers of his own time. In A Foregone Conclusion (1875), a young American painter roams through Europe for years before at last deciding to marry the woman who, he erroneously thinks, has been in love with an Italian priest turned agnostic. A Modern Instance (1882) offers an unflinching portrait of an unhappy marriage and ends with a hero barred by his perhaps overscrupulous conscience from marrying the divorced heroine. Once again personal dilemmas are seen as symptoms of the rapid displacement of older social and religious stabilities by opportunism and commercial progress. One of the most engaging of all his novels, Indian Summer(1885), is touched with the Jamesian glamour of romantic confusion among two American couples in Italy. Here Howells’s realism takes a quietly humorous turn. Situations which might be exploited by another novelist for their theatrical or melodramatic possibilities are instead eroded by the often trivial or casual experiences of everyday living. Characteristically, Howells is opposed to exaggeration in the interest of discovering how people, despite the crises that beset them, manage to find their way. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells’s best-known work, gives a brilliantly skeptical portrait of American business life and its perils, celebrating not the rise but the loss of fortune that makes possible the hero’s recovery of his earlier integrity and happiness. “There are,” remarked a contemporary reviewer, “thousands of Silas Laphams throughout the United States,” and present-day readers might agree that there still are. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Henry James Novels 1896 1899 LOA 139 written by Henry James and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2003-03-10 with total page 1054 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Library of America volume collects four novels written by Henry James in the period immediately following his unsuccessful five-year-long attempt to establish himself as a playwright on the London stage. Hoping to convert his “infinite little loss” into “infinite little gain,” James returned to the novelistic examination of English society with a new appreciation for what he called the “divine principle of the Scenario,” “a key that, working in the same general way fits the complicated chambers of both the dramatic and the narrative lock.” His continued interest in dramatic form is demonstrated in The Other House (1896), which was derived from the scenario for a three-act play. Set in two neighboring houses and told mostly through dialogue, the novel explores the violent and tragic consequences of jealousy and frustrated passion. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), one of the most tightly constructed of James’s late novels, a house and its exquisite antique furnishings and artwork become the source of a protracted struggle involving the proud and imperious Mrs. Gereth, her amiable son, Owen, his philistine fiancée, Mona Brigstock, and the sensitive Fleda Vetch, whose moral judgment is tested by her conflicting allegiances. What Maisie Knew (1897) explores with perception and sensitivity the effect upon a young girl of her parents’ bitter divorce and their subsequent remarriages. In writing the novel James chose as his point of view what he described as “the consciousness, the dim, sweet, scared, wondering, clinging perception of the child.” The Awkward Age (1899) examines the complicated relations among the members of a sophisticated London social circle almost entirely through dialogue as it depicts the shifting marital prospects of a young woman poised on the verge of adult life. Both of these novels insightfully explore the ambiguity of childhood “innocence” amid adult struggles over money, power, and love. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Henry James Complete Stories Vol 3 1884 1891 LOA 107 written by Henry James and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1999-01-11 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes overshadowed by his work as a novelist, Henry James’s short fiction is an astonishing achievement, a triumph of inventiveness and restless curiosity. This Library of America volume (the third of five volumes devoted to his short fiction) includes among its seventeen stories some of James’s greatest masterpieces. “The Aspern Papers” is a stunning novella about emotional ruthlessness in the service of literary scholarship. “The Pupil” is a densely suggestive account of the moral perplexities underlying the relationship between an impoverished tutor and a young invalid. “The Lesson of the Master” is an intricate study of ambition, disappointment, and the demands of a life devoted to art. “Brooksmith” is a moving portrait of a house servant and “Sir Edmund Orme” is an enthralling ghost story. In “The Liar,” a painter attempts to force a former love to admit that her present husband is a pathological liar; in “The Patagonia,” a young man cavalierly flirts with a young woman en route to her wedding in England, with disastrous consequences. More than half the stories within this volume are available in no other edition. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book James Fenimore Cooper The Leatherstocking Tales Vol 1 LOA 26 written by James Fenimore Cooper and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1985-07-01 with total page 1388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic. Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823), as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Cooperstown), New York, at the end of the eighteenth century. There he becomes caught in the struggles of party, family, and class to control the changing American land and to determine what sort of civilization will replace the rapidly vanishing wilderness. When Natty Bumppo started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset at the novel's close, one early reader said, "I longed to go with him." The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is a pure unabashed narrative of adventure. It looks back to the earlier time of the French and Indian Wars, when Natty and his two companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, survivors of a once-proud Indian nation, attempt a daring rescue and seek to forestall the plan of the French to unleash their Mingo allies on a wave of terror through the English settlements. The Prairie (1827) takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains across the Mississippi. On this vast and barren stage, the Sioux and Pawnee, the outlaw clan of Ishmael Bush, and members of the Lewis and Clark expedition enact a romantic drama of intrigue, pursuit, and biblical justice that reflects Cooper's historical dialectic of culture and nature, of the American nation and the American continent. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Mark Twain Mississippi Writings LOA 5 written by Mark Twain and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1982-11-01 with total page 1190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, together in one volume for the first time. Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book Sherwood Anderson Collected Stories LOA 235 written by Sherwood Anderson and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2012-12-27 with total page 1084 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first complete anthology of short stories by “the creator of the American short story”— includes the landmark collection Winesburg, Ohio (Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic) In the winter of 1912, Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) abruptly left his office and spent three days wandering through the Ohio countryside, a victim of “nervous exhaustion.” Over the next few years, abandoning his family and his business, he resolved to become a writer. Novels and poetry followed, but it was with the story collection Winesburg, Ohio that he found his ideal form, remaking the American short story for the modern era. Hart Crane, one of the first to recognize Anderson’s genius, quickly hailed his accomplishment: “America should read this book on her knees.” Here—for the first time in a single volume—are all the collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Exploring the hidden recesses of small-town life, these haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories pivot on seemingly quiet moments when lives change, futures are recast, and pasts come to reckon. They transformed the tone of American storytelling, inspiring writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, and defining a tradition of midwestern fiction that includes Charles Baxter, editor of this volume. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.