In this brisk and riveting biography, Alex Beam takes readers on a journey through Wallace Stegner’s life and complicated legacy as one of the twentieth century’s best storytellers and chroniclers of the American West.In a career that spanned half a century, Stegner wrote fourteen novels and seventeen works of nonfiction. Reared on the Canadian-American frontier and educated in Salt Lake City, Utah, this quintessential Man of the West won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Bo...

The true story of the intimate relationship that gave birth to the Farnsworth House, a masterpiece of twentieth-century architecture—and disintegrated into a bitter feud over love, money, gender, and the very nature of art.“An intimate portrait . . . alive with architectural intrigue.”—Architect MagazineIn 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design ...

The Feud is the deliciously ironic (and sad) tale of how two literary giants destroyed their friendship in a fit of mutual pique and egomania.In 1940, Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning him book reviews for The New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim Fellowship. Their intim...

Its landscaped ground, chosen by Frederick Law Olmsted and dotted with Tudor mansions, could belong to a New England prep school. There are no fences, no guards, no locked gates. But McLean Hospital is a mental institution-one of the most famous, most elite, and once most luxurious in America. McLean "alumni" include Olmsted himself, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Taylor and Ray Charles, as well as (more secretly) other notables from among the rich and famous. In its "golden age," McLe...

A gripping account of the mob killing of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism“American Crucifixion paints a brilliant picture of religious experimentation, public intolerance, and the making of a martyr.”—Chicago TribuneOn June 27, 1844, in the dusty frontier town of Carthage, Illinois, Joseph Smith and three of his associates waited anxiously in a jail cell. The dynamic founding prophet of Mormonism no longer had a congregation to p...

Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial "dead white men," are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And ho...

The true story of the intimate relationship that gave birth to the Farnsworth House, a masterpiece of twentieth-century architecture—and disintegrated into a bitter feud over love, money, gender, and the very nature of art.“An intimate portrait . . . alive with architectural intrigue.”—Architect MagazineIn 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design ...

In this true story—a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights—Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a mon...

The true story of one of Hitler's most feared and brutal killers: his life and crimes, postwar atrocities, and forty-year evasion of justice.During World War II, SS Hauptsturmführer Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie earned a reputation for sadistic cruelty unmatched by all but a handful of his contemporaries in Adolf Hitler's Gestapo. In 1942, he was dispatched to Nazi-occupied France after leaving his bloodstained mark on the Netherlands. In Lyons, Barbie was entrusted with...

The chilling true story of Oregon's most shocking killer! Jimmy Rode was serving a sentence for burglary in a Florida prison when he met serial killer Ted Bundy. It was Bundy who gave him a Seattle newspaper containing personal ads--an easy means for meeting vulnerable female victims--that launched Rode on a coast-to-coast killing spree under the alias of Cesar Barone. Now, in detail, acclaimed true crime author Lasseter unleashes the story of Jimmy Rode!About the author: After ret...

The "fascinating" true story behind the HBO Max and Hulu series about Texas housewife Candy Montgomery and the bizarre murder that shocked a community ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ).Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore had a lot in common: They sang together in the Methodist church choir, their daughters were best friends, and their husbands had good jobs working for technology companies in the north Dallas suburbs known as ...

New York Times Bestseller: From the journalists who covered the story, the shocking crimes of Gary Ridgway, America's most prolific serial murderer.In the 1980s and 1990s, forty-nine women in the Seattle area were brutally murdered, their bodies dumped along the Green River and Pacific Highway South in Washington State. Despite an exhaustive investigation—even serial killer Ted Bundy was consulted to assist with psychological profiling—the...