Essays on the roles played by women in forming American attitudes about benevolence and poverty reliefAmerican culture has long had a conflicted relationship with assistance to the poor. Cotton Mather and John Winthrop were staunch proponents of Christian charity as fundamental to colonial American society, while transcendentalists harbored deep skepticism towards benevolence in favor of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau’s insistence on an ascetic life....

Panic Fiction explores a unique body of antebellum American women’s writing that illuminates women’s relationships to the marketplace and the links between developing ideologies of domesticity and the formation of an American middle class.Between the mid-1830s and the late 1850s, authors such as Hannah Lee, Catharine Sedgwick, Eliza Follen, Maria McIntosh, and Maria Cummins wrote dozens of novels and stories depicting the effects of financial panic on the home and proposin...

Don't waste money on individual texts by a classic author. Get (nearly) all in 1, 2 or (at most) 3 FREE-FOREVER volumes. Save space in your ebook shelves.The works of Jane Austen as originally published but converted for easy reading by cross-platform ebook / ePUB standards. Organized alphabetically and by type of text for quicker navigation; a master table of contents leads you to specific tables of contents for each included work. This volume includes:

"Vonnegut's life was a fascinating tragicomedy worthy of his best novels . . . A superbly researched and above all very entertaining biography." —Blake Bailey, New York Times–bestselling author of Philip Roth: The BiographyA New York Times Notable BookA Washington Post Notable Nonfiction BookIn 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned bio...

In book 3 of the Anne of Green Gables series, Anne leaves Green Gables to pursue her dream of getting a college education. Along the way she finds new friends, good times and learns a lot about herself and others--especially through her romantic interests in two key characters, one of which experiences a brush with death that changes the course of Anne's life forever.

Why are we so obsessed with staying young?In a culture that advocates the pursuit of endless youth and physical beauty how can we embrace the reality, the pleasures and the rewards of getting on? And what does the 'fight against ageing' mean when all women must eventually face the double-standard of ageism and sexism?Once past fifty, older women begin to sense that they have become invisible. From the visual displays in the mall to the pages of magazines an...

A critical evaluation of Philip Roth—the first of its kind—that takes on the man, the myth, and the work.Philip Roth is one of the most renowned writers of our time. From his debut, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960, and the explosion of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 to his haunting reimagining of Anne Frank's story in The Ghost Writer ten years later and the series of masterworks starting in the mid-eighties—

A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury AmericaIn a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers th...

White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public.As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had e...

Raymond Chandler was among the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture. Visiting Chandler's many homes and apartments, Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Ange...

"Essential reading for any serious beginning writer . . . illuminating." — San Francisco ChronicleCarson McCullers is renowned for her Southern Gothic fiction and for such modern classics as The Member of the Wedding. This collection includes an assortment of her earliest work, written mostly before she was nineteen.Included are stories, essays, articles, poems, and writing about writing—including the working outline of "The Mute," which wo...

A towering figure in American culture and a global twentieth-century icon, Bob Dylan has been at the centre of American life for over forty years. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan brings fresh insights into the imposing range of Dylan's creative output. The first Part approaches Dylan's output thematically, tracing the evolution of Dylan's writing and his engagement with American popular music, religion, politics, fame, and his work as a songwriter and performer. Essays in Part II anal...