The true diversity of the American experience comes to life in this superlative collection of autobiographies—including those of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglas, Mark Twain, and more...A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), perhaps the first American bestseller, recounts this thirty-nine-year-old woman’s harrowing months as the captive of Narragansett Indians.The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiography is a key text in autobiography studies. In it he proposed that the self that finds expression in autobiography is in fundamental ways a kind of fictive construct, a fiction articulated in a fiction. In this new book Eakin turns his attention to what he sees as the defining assumption of autobiography: that the story of the self does refer to a world of biographical and historical fact. Here he shows that people write autobiography no...

Discover the works of Joe Brainard, whose quirky style earned him a reputation as a “recognizable American phenomenon” and “oddball classicist”—with a foreword by 4321 author Paul Auster (John Ashbery)An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical work I Remember has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many ...

The renowned modernist poet of experiment and innovation known as “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and a pioneer of Filipino American poetryA finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his first U.S. poetry collection published by Viking Press in 1942, Villa was admired for “the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems” (Marianne Moore). Doveglion (Villa’s pen name for dove, eagle, and lion) contains Villa’s collected poetry,...

From 1890-1915, the most influential black man in America was Booker T. Washington, who less than 35 years earlier had been born into slavery. The young boy worked laboriously until emancipation before going on to seek an education. By the time he was 40, he was consolidating a network of supporters that came to be known as the Tuskegee Machine, helping coordinate action with the support of black businesses, religious communities, and others. With his position of power, Washington spoke ou...

A surreal new collection from an acclaimed poetHallucinogenic plants chant in chorus. A thoughtful dog grants an interview. A caterpillar offers life advice. Amy Gerstler’s newest collection of poetry, Dearest Creature, marries fact and fiction in a menagerie of dramatic monologues, twisted love poems, and epistolary pleadings. Drawing on sources as disparate as Lewis Carroll and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as abnormal psychology, etiquette, and a...

A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poetAcclaimed for her visionary, incantatory verse and her experimental ethos, Anne Waldman's newest book-length poem is an allegory of a radical spirit in lockdown, dominated by "Deciders" and "Imposters" who threaten the future of poetry and its archive. A doppelganger nightmare ensues: the imposter "Anne" is a succubus, and the original Anne has to break free from a metaphorical castle of torture and psycho...

"The rebel in spring is a sometime thing, but beware the rebel in autumn…" states the epigraph to Michael Shaara's great unpublished novel, The Rebel in Autumn. Shaara wrote Rebel immediately before The Killer Angels (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), in the late 1960s while teaching creative writing at Florida State University. Loosely based on his years as a professor on the then-small Southern college campus, Rebel is perhaps Shaara's most fully realized novel.The year is 19...

If you don't know Melville's letters to Hawthorne, you don't know Melville. These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy. The Divine Magnet will provide the general...

"Agee's prose poem captures the textural variety of Brooklyn in language that bears reading aloud for its lilt, melody, and pleasingly pungent vocabulary." — Booklist (starred review)For the first time in book form—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning authorForeword by Jonathan Lethem, author Motherless BrooklynIn 1939, James Agee was assigned to write an article on Brooklyn for a special issue of Fort...

Flannery O'Connor once noted, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Her railroading metaphor wittily captures much of the respect and unease Faulkner's example brought the worldwide community of authors.Few other writers have exerted as profound an influence on literature as Faulkner. Prominent literary...