Download or read book Pulitzer Prize Biographies of Outstanding American Writers written by Heinz-Dietrich Fischer and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents excerpts from fifteen Pulitzer Prize-winning biographical works about well-known American writers of different kinds, – communicators in form of contributors to newspapers as well as novelists and poets. Each author is protrayed by describing remarkable phases in his or her career.

Download or read book The Most Famous Man in America written by Debby Applegate and published by Image. This book was released on 2007-04-17 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one predicted success for Henry Ward Beecher at his birth in 1813. The blithe, boisterous son of the last great Puritan minister, he seemed destined to be overshadowed by his brilliant siblings—especially his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who penned the century’s bestselling book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But when pushed into the ministry, the charismatic Beecher found international fame by shedding his father’s Old Testament–style fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a New Testament–based gospel of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity. By the 1850s, his spectacular sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights had made him New York’s number one tourist attraction, so wildly popular that the ferries from Manhattan to Brooklyn were dubbed “Beecher Boats.” Beecher inserted himself into nearly every important drama of the era—among them the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements, the rise of the entertainment industry and tabloid press, and controversies ranging from Darwinian evolution to presidential politics. He was notorious for his irreverent humor and melodramatic gestures, such as auctioning slaves to freedom in his pulpit and shipping rifles—nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles”—to the antislavery resistance fighters in Kansas. Thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended—and sometimes parodied—him. And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with one of his most pious parishioners. Suddenly the “Gospel of Love” seemed to rationalize a life of lust. The cuckolded husband brought charges of “criminal conversation” in a salacious trial that became the most widely covered event of the century, garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War. Beecher survived, but his reputation and his causes—from women’s rights to progressive evangelicalism—suffered devastating setbacks that echo to this day. Featuring the page-turning suspense of a novel and dramatic new historical evidence, Debby Applegate has written the definitive biography of this captivating, mercurial, and sometimes infuriating figure. In our own time, when religion and politics are again colliding and adultery in high places still commands headlines, Beecher’s story sheds new light on the culture and conflicts of contemporary America.

Download or read book American Lion written by Jon Meacham and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of a larger-than-life president who defied norms, divided a nation, and changed Washington forever Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency. Beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, Andrew Jackson was an orphan who fought his way to the pinnacle of power, bending the nation to his will in the cause of democracy. Jackson’s election in 1828 ushered in a new and lasting era in which the people, not distant elites, were the guiding force in American politics. Democracy made its stand in the Jackson years, and he gave voice to the hopes and the fears of a restless, changing nation facing challenging times at home and threats abroad. To tell the saga of Jackson’s presidency, acclaimed author Jon Meacham goes inside the Jackson White House. Drawing on newly discovered family letters and papers, he details the human drama–the family, the women, and the inner circle of advisers– that shaped Jackson’s private world through years of storm and victory. One of our most significant yet dimly recalled presidents, Jackson was a battle-hardened warrior, the founder of the Democratic Party, and the architect of the presidency as we know it. His story is one of violence, sex, courage, and tragedy. With his powerful persona, his evident bravery, and his mystical connection to the people, Jackson moved the White House from the periphery of government to the center of national action, articulating a vision of change that challenged entrenched interests to heed the popular will– or face his formidable wrath. The greatest of the presidents who have followed Jackson in the White House–from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to FDR to Truman–have found inspiration in his example, and virtue in his vision. Jackson was the most contradictory of men. The architect of the removal of Indians from their native lands, he was warmly sentimental and risked everything to give more power to ordinary citizens. He was, in short, a lot like his country: alternately kind and vicious, brilliant and blind; and a man who fought a lifelong war to keep the republic safe–no matter what it took.

Download or read book Margaret Fuller written by Megan Marshall and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a fresh look at the trailblazing life of a great American heroine Thoreau s first editor, Emerson s close friend, the first female war correspondent, and a passionate advocate of personal liberation and political freedom. "Megan Marshall's brilliant Margaret Fuller brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to this astonishing creature. She rushes out at us from her nineteenth century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent." Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity "Megan Marshall gives new meaning to close reading from words on a page she conjures a fantastically rich inner life, a meld of body, mind, and soul. Drawing on the letters and diaries of Margaret Fuller and her circle, she has brought us a brave, visionary, sensual, tough-minded intellectual, a first woman who was unique yet stood for all women. A masterful achievement by a great American writer and scholar. Evan Thomas, author of Ike s Bluff: President Eisenhower s Secret Battle to Save the World "Megan Marshall s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is the best single volume ever written on Fuller. Carefully researched and beautifully composed, the book brings Fuller back to life in all her intellectual vivacity and emotional intensity. Marshall s Fuller overwhelms the reader, just as Fuller herself overwhelmed everyone she met. A masterpiece of empathetic biography, this is the book Fuller herself would have wanted. You will not be able to put it down." Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire Praise for The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism A stunning work of biography and intellectual history. Deftly weaving material from the letters and journals of all three sisters, Ms. Marshall . . . performs the intellectual equivalent of a triple axel. William Grimes, New York Times This beautifully written book is at once an intimate portrait of three remarkable sisters and a study of women s place in the vibrant intellectual and literary culture of nineteenth-century New England. The product of twenty years of research, Megan Marshall s tour de force is impossible to put down. Drew Gilpin Faust, author of The Republic of Suffering "

Download or read book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings written by Annette Gordon-Reed and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1998-03-29 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, it was perhaps the most hotly contested topic. The publication of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. In this study, Gordon-Reed assembles a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place has been denied a fair hearing. Friends of Jefferson sought to debunk the Hemings story as early as 1800, and most subsequent historians and biographers followed suit, finding the affair unthinkable based upon their view of Jefferson's life, character, and beliefs. Gordon-Reed responds to these critics by pointing out numerous errors and prejudices in their writings, ranging from inaccurate citations, to impossible time lines, to virtual exclusions of evidence—especially evidence concerning the Hemings family. She demonstrates how these scholars may have been misguided by their own biases and may even have tailored evidence to serve and preserve their opinions of Jefferson. This updated edition of the book also includes an afterword in which the author comments on the DNA study that provided further evidence of a Jefferson and Hemings liaison. Possessing both a layperson's unfettered curiosity and a lawyer's logical mind, Annette Gordon-Reed writes with a style and compassion that are irresistible. Each chapter revolves around a key figure in the Hemings drama, and the resulting portraits are engrossing and very personal. Gordon-Reed also brings a keen intuitive sense of the psychological complexities of human relationships—relationships that, in the real world, often develop regardless of status or race. The most compelling element of all, however, is her extensive and careful research, which often allows the evidence to speak for itself. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy is the definitive look at a centuries-old question that should fascinate general readers and historians alike.

Download or read book All the Light We Cannot See written by Anthony Doerr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Download or read book W E B Du Bois written by David L. Lewis and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2001-10-01 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second part of a biography of the African American author and scholar chronicles the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, Du Bois's battle for equality and justice for African Americans, and his self-exile in Ghana.

Download or read book American Prometheus written by Kai Bird and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 667 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***THE INSPIRATION FOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S NEW FILM OPPENHEIMER*** WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 'Reads like a thriller, gripping and terrifying' Sunday Times Physicist and polymath, as familiar with Hindu scriptures as he was with quantum mechanics, J. Robert Oppenheimer - director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb - was the most famous scientist of his generation. In their meticulous and riveting biography, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin reveal a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man, profoundly involved with some of the momentous events of the twentieth century.

Download or read book The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived written by Tom Shroder and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Washington Post Book Club's October Pick One of Washington Independent Review of Book's Favorite Books of 2016 “A grandson of writer MacKinlay Kantor unravels the tangles of his grandfather's life and finds many of those same threads (the good, the bad, the ugly) in his own…A compelling account, suffused with both sympathy and sharpness, of a writer who's mostly forgotten and of a grandson who's grateful.”—Kirkus Reviews An award-winning veteran of The Washington Post and The Miami Herald, Tom Shroder has made a career of investigative journalism and human-interest stories, from those of children who claim to have memories of past lives, in his book Old Souls, to that of a former Marine suffering from debilitating PTSD and his doctor pioneering a successful psychedelic drug treat­ment in Acid Test. Shroder’s most fascinating subject, however, comes from within his own family: his grandfather MacKinlay Kantor was the world-famous author of Andersonville, the seminal novel about the Civil War. As a child, Shroder was in awe of his grandfather’s larger-than-life character. Kantor’s friends included Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, Gregory Peck, and James Cagney. He was an early mentor to the novelist John D. MacDonald and is cred­ited with discovering the singer Burl Ives. Kantor wrote the novel Glory for Me, which became the multi-Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives. He ghostwrote General Curtis LeMay’s memoirs, penning the infamous words “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age,” referring to North Vietnam. Kantor also suffered from alcoholism, an outsize ego, and an abusive and publicly embarrassing personality where his family was concerned; he blew through several small fortunes in his lifetime, and died nearly destitute. In The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived, Shroder revisits the past—Kantor’s upbringing, his early life, his career trajectory— and writes not just the life story of one man but a meditation on fame, family secrets and legacies, and what is remembered after we are gone.

Download or read book George F Kennan written by John Lewis Gaddis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Widely and enthusiastically acclaimed, this is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most fascinating but troubled figures of the twentieth century by the nation's leading Cold War historian. In the late 1940s, George F. Kennan—then a bright but, relatively obscure American diplomat—wrote the "long telegram" and the "X" article. These two documents laid out United States' strategy for "containing" the Soviet Union—a strategy which Kennan himself questioned in later years. Based on exclusive access to Kennan and his archives, this landmark history illuminates a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.

Download or read book Margaret Fuller written by Megan Marshall and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered” three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New-York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son. Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s fortieth birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.

Download or read book Angela s Ashes written by Frank McCourt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Memoir, about Irish Americans.

Download or read book Master of the Senate written by Robert A. Caro and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002-04-23 with total page 1233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master of the Senate, Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. It was during these years that all Johnson’s experience—from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine—came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term-the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate’s hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the “unchangeable” Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control. Caro demonstrates how Johnson’s political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust—or at least the cooperation—of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson’s ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson’s amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875. Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro’s peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself—the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing—and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.

Download or read book Personal History written by Katharine Graham and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen in the new movie The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep, here is the captivating, inside story of the woman who piloted the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media. In this bestselling and widely acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story - one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candour and dignity of its telling. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband - a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman's union as she entered the profane boys' club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted - and mastered - the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.

Download or read book The Writers Compound written by Jack L. Roberts and published by Palm Tree Press. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: GO BEHIND THE WOODEN GATES of the writers' compound in Key West to discover the untold story of four of the most celebrated America authors in the 20th century. Based on anecdotes, events, and conversations gleaned from first-person interviews with other writers and friends who knew them best, The Writers' Compound reveals both the good times and the bitter resentments that confronted these writers on their island paradise. In addition to the fascinating story of these four famous writers, The Writers' Compound also captures both the nostalgia of the period, and the enduring allure of Key West today. The Writers John Ciardi: An admitted grouch whose volatile temper and sarcastic wit could eviscerate anyone in his line of fire, but who could also be "extremely entertaining and funny and gregarious." Ralph Ellison: A complicated man who may or may not have been homophobic, but openly admitted that he accepted gays "as long as they were not obvious." John Hersey: Whose distinguished career as a Pulitzer Prize winning author was marred by charges of plagiarism - a charge he reluctantly admitted to but never really accepted. Richard Wilbur: An unabashed free spirit who embraced an island that he found (like the movie Bonnie and Clyde) "morally questionable, but, aesthetically, very pleasing."

Download or read book John Adams written by David McCullough and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles John Adams, an influential patriot during the American Revolution who became the nation's first vice president and second president.

Download or read book The Good Times written by Russell Baker and published by Diversion Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “superb [and] often hilarious” memoir of a life in journalism, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Growing Up (The New York Times Book Review). “Baker here recalls his years at the Baltimore Sun, where, on ‘starvation wages,’ he worked on the police beat, as a rewrite man, feature writer and White House correspondent. Sent to London in 1953 to report on the coronation, he spent the happiest year of his life there as an innocent abroad. Moving to the New York Times and becoming a ‘two-fisted drinker,’ he covered the Senate and the national political campaigns of 1956 and 1960, and, just as he was becoming bored with routine reporting and the obligation to keep judgments out of his stories, was offered the opportunity to write his own op-ed page column, ‘The Observer.’ With its lively stories about journalists, Washington politicians and topical scandals, the book will delight Baker’s devotees—and significantly expand their already vast number.” —Publishers Weekly “Aspiring writers will chuckle over Baker’s first, horrible day on police beat, his panicked interview with Evelyn Waugh, and his arrival at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in top hat, tails, and brown-bag lunch.” —Library Journal “A wonderful book.” —Kirkus Reviews