American poet and writer John G. Neihardt (1881-1973) possessed an inquiring and spiritual mind. Those qualities came to the fore in Black Elk Speaks, the story of the Lakota holy man Black Elk, for which he is best remembered. Over the course of thirty years he also wrote a five-volume epic poem, A Cycle of the West, which told the story of the settlement of the American West. Despite Neihardt's widespread name recognition, the success of Black Elk Speaks, and a list of critically acclaimed books and poems, Lonesome Dreamer is the first biography of Neihardt in nearly forty years. Timothy G. Anderson describes Neihardt's life from his humble beginnings in Illinois to being named poet laureate of Nebraska in 1921 and to his appearance on the Dick Cavett Show at the age of ninety. Anderson also delves into Neihardt's success as a poet far from the East Coast literary establishment, his resistance to modernist movements in poetry, and his wish to understand and describe the experience of the Plains Indians. Offering insight into both his personal and his literary life, this biography reaffirms Neihardt's place in American literary history, his successes and failures, and his unbreakable spirit.

"If you've wondered how your favorite masterpieces got their starts, the itch can now be scratched."--Foreword Review's Matt Sutherland "Grogan's research is meticulous and empirical...a lively peek into literary genius."--Kirkus For readers and writers alike, Origins of a Story is the inspiring collection of 202 amazing true stories behind the inspiration for the world's greatest literature! Did you know Lennie from Of Mice and Men was based on a real person? Or how about that Charlotte's Web was based on an actual spider and her egg that E. B. White would carry from Maine to New York on business trips? Origins of a Story profiles 202 famous literary masterpieces and explores how each story got its start. Spanning works from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, this book is the first of its kind. Get glimpses of the reality behind these fictional stories, and learn about the individual creative process for each writer. Origins of a Story will not only leave you with a different perspective into your favorite works of fiction, but it will also have you inspired to take your everyday life and craft it into a literary masterpiece!

This absorbing study of Elizabeth Gaskell's early life up to her marriage in 1832 is based almost entirely on new evidence. Also, using parish records, marriage settlements, property transfers, wills, record office documents, letters, journals and private papers, John Chapple has recreated the background of one of the nineteenth century's greatest novelists. The widely differing lives of her father, brother and the aunt who raised her are illuminated at length by these original documents. Chapple has discovered a number of letters written by close relations that shed new light on her upbringing, and he analyses three hitherto unknown travel journals buy her Knutsford cousins which prove that she grew up in a literary milieu. Other biographical accounts of Elizabeth Gaskell's life have been compared and, where necessary, corrected, but Chapple's main emphasis lies with the wealth of new material that he has discovered. This ensures that The early years will provide a secure basis for future criticism of her creative works, which so often rely on biographical details -- .

This study explores the poetics and politics of self in J. M. Coetzee's "autre"-biographical works "Scenes from Provincial Life". The author provides a detailed analysis of Coetzee's conception of self in his fictionalized memoirs, as well as of philosophical, aesthetic and political implications of "autre"-biography. She reads these works as literary figurations of an estranged self, maintaining that they engage with deeply historical but also universal questions of the relation between self and power. Coetzee's fictionalized memoirs, she argues, are thus not merely dramatizations of the inherent elusiveness of the self but a critique of systems and discourses of normativization and oppression.

From the award-winning author of "Across a Hundred Mountains."
Cuando el padre de Reyna Grande deja a su esposa y sus tres hijos atras en un pueblo de Mexico para hacer el peligroso viaje a traves de la frontera a los Estados Unidos, promete que pronto regresara con el dinero suficiente para construir la casa de sus suenos. Sus promesas se vuelven mas dificiles de creer cuando los meses de espera se convierten en anos. Cuando se lleva a su esposa para reunirse con el, Reyna y sus hermanos son depositados en el hogar ya sobrecargado de su abuela paterna, Evila, una mujer endurecida por la vida.
Los tres hermanos se ven obligados a cuidar de si mismos. En los juegos infantiles encuentran una manera de olvidar el dolor del abandono y a resolver problemas de adultos. Cuando su madre regresa, la reunion sienta las bases para un capitulo nuevo y dramatico en la vida de Reyna: su propio viaje a "El otro lado "para vivir con el hombre que ha poseido su imaginacion durante anos-- su padre ausente.
En esta memoria extraordinaria, la galardonada escritora Reyna Grande le da vida a sus anos tumultuosos, capturando la confusion y las contradicciones de una infancia divida entre dos padres y dos paises. Solo en los libros, en la musica y en su rica imaginacion ella encontrara consuelo, un refugio momentaneo de un mundo en el que cada lugar se siente como "El otro lado." "La distancia entre nosotros "capta el paso de una nina de la infancia a la adolescencia y mas alla. Una divertida, lirica, pero desgarradora historia, nos recuerda que las alegrias y las tristezas de la infancia estan siempre con nosotros, impresas en el corazon, recordandonos de ese lugar que fue nuestro primer hogar.

A close-up look at how J.D. Salinger’s private life influenced his famous stories.

J.D. Salinger remains one of America’s best known but least understood writers.

His 1951 book, The Catcher in the Rye, lives on as one of the most iconic American novels of all time. Yet after his commercial and literary success, Salinger soon retreated to a rural town in New Hampshire and lived in seclusion for the rest of his life. He wrote nearly every day but didn’t publish any of his work after 1965. He became famous for not wanting to be famous.

His story, however, is not over. His son, Matt, has been sorting through the unpublished writing Salinger left behind after his death in 2010. Most of these stories will be released soon, and are heavily influenced by his years in seclusion. Salinger’s Soul tells of his traumatic experience in World War II, as well as his transition from the Judaism of his youth to his embrace of a mystical form of Hinduism known as Vedanta. It was Vedanta that influenced his post Catcher fiction, from Nine Stories to Franny and Zooey.

Yet Salinger veered from Vedanta in one crucial way: he didn’t heed its dictum to lead a life of celibacy. Instead, Salinger was obsessed with young women, those “in the last minutes of their girlhood.”

In all, his wartime experience, his religious beliefs, and his romantic relationships defined his life in seclusion and influenced his writing. Salinger’s Soul looks at his little-known personal voyage of discovery.

A retelling of American modernism through the lines of solidarity and division within and among ethnic and religious identities found in poetry. What happens if we approach the reading and writing of poetry not as an individual act, but as a public one? Answering this question challenges common assumptions about modern poetry and requires that we explore the important questions that define genre: Where is this poem situated, and how did it get there? Joshua Logan Wall's Situating Poetry studies five poets of the New York literary scene rarely considered together: James Weldon Johnson, Charles Reznikoff, Lola Ridge, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Hayden. Charting their works and careers from 1910-1940, Wall illustrates how these politically marginalized writers from drastically different religious backgrounds wrestled with their status as American outsiders. These poets produced a secularized version of America in which poetry, rather than God, governed individual obligations to one another across multiethnic barriers. Adopting a multiethnic and pluralist approach, Wall argues that each of these poets-two Black, two Jewish, and one Irish-American anarchist-shares a desire to create more truly democratic communities through art and through the covenantal publics created by their poems despite otherwise sitting uncomfortably, at best, within a more standard literary history. In this unique account of American modernist poetics, religious pluralism creates a lens through which to consider the bounds of solidarity and division within and among ethnic identities and their corresponding literatures.

'A brave, beautiful book that could double as a handbook to accompany anyone on their journey through cancer' Jackie Kay, New Statesman The Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and invigorating account of the experience of breast cancer, from biopsy to mastectomy, told by the great feminist and activist Audre Lorde. Moving between journal entry, memoir, and essay, Lorde fuses the personal and political to reflect on the many questions breast cancer raises: questions of survival, sexuality, prosthesis and self-care. It is a journey of survival, friendship, and self-acceptance. 'Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet' Adrienne Rich 'This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me' Alice Walker

From the acclaimed author of The Most Dangerous Book, the incredible true story behind the creation of a masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment In the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Raskolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment, and from the moment it was published it was a sensation. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the creation of a work of literature that has bewitched readers for over a century, and of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre Francois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. As reports of his trial tore through Europe, readers asked themselves: could the instincts of nihilism, the philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries, also drive a man to murder? Showing how both men's lives were directed by the intoxicating new ideas swirling around Europe in the nineteenth century, The Sinner and the Saint also reveals why they still appal and entice us today. Thrilling and definitive, this is the story of a masterpiece.

"Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air." -NPR In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation "as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself." Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet's search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America. The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories. There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can't really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache. Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career-from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank's unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times. The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.

In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station attended by the world's media. He was eighty-two years old and had lived a remarkable and long life during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history. Born into a privileged aristocratic family, he seemed set to join the ranks of degenerate Russian noblemen, but fighting in the Crimean war alongside rank and file soldiers opened his eyes to Russia's social problems and he threw himself into teaching the peasantry to read and write. After his marriage he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both regarded as two of the greatest novels in world literature. Rosamund Bartlett's exceptional biography of this brilliant, maddening and contrary man draws on key Russian sources, including the many fascinating new materials which have been published about Tolstoy and his legacy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This edition, expanded to include the text of letters unavailable at the time of the volume's first publication in 1969, records James Boswell's quest over a period of more than twenty years to amplify his knowledge of his major biographical subject, Samuel Johnson, through a detailed correspondence with a wide network of friends, informants, and other authorities. The volume, with revised and updated annotation, shows not just Boswell's struggles through his personal distresses to gather material for his Life of Johnson, but notes many of his revisions of his sources, changes made in manuscript and proof, and revisions of the first and second editions. It presents letters that illuminate the contemporary reception of his powerfully innovative, controversial, and influential biography (which appeared first in 1791), taking the story as far as exchanges in 1808 between Boswell's friend and editor, Edmond Malone, and his son, James Boswell the younger, about corrections for the sixth edition of 1811. Throughout, the annotation brings to life an extensive range of eighteenth-century figures, issues and topics.The Times Literary Supplement (23 July 1970) found the interest of this 'fascinating' volume threefold: 'It gives fresh evidence of Boswell's scrupulousness, ability and tact; it leads us to a fuller understanding of what people expected from biography, and what were eighteenth-century notions of propriety and accuracy; and it enables us perhaps to define more clearly the achievement of Boswell's masterpiece. ' This corrected and enlarged version (the first edition has been out of print for two decades) will serve as a valuable supplement and companion to the Yale manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, upon which all future editions of Boswell's biography will need to draw.

Novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Langston Hughes, two of America's greatest writers, first met in New York City in 1925. Drawn to each other, they launched a radical journal. Later, meeting by accident in Alabama, they became close as they travelled together-Hurston interviewing African Americans for folk stories, Hughes getting his first taste of the deep South. By illuminating their lives, work, competitiveness and ambitions, Yuval Taylor savvily explores how their friendship and literary collaborations would end in acrimonious accusations.

Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Langston Hughes ("The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "Let America Be America Again") were collaborators, literary gadflies and close companions. They travelled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural southern US collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone and wrote scores of loving letters to each other. They even had the same patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who insisted on being called "Godmother". Paying them lavishly while trying to control their work, Mason may have been the spark for their bitter falling-out. Yuval Taylor answers questions about their split while illuminating Hurston's and Hughes's lives, work, competitiveness and ambition.

Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in-and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas. With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay "The Herd of Independent Minds." An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken brings to life with vivid accounts from Rosenberg's life. Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg's brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

Upon publication, "Don't Panic" quickly established itself as the definitive companion to "Adams" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". This edition comes up-to-date, covering the movie, "And Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer and the build up to the 30th anniversary of the first novel. Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman celebrates the life and work of Douglas Adams who, in a field in Innsbruck in 1971, had an idea that became "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". The radio series that started it all, the five - soon to be six - book 'trilogy', the TV series, almost-film and actual film, and everything in between.

Described by Philip Pullman as 'the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkein', Alan Garner has been enrapturing readers with works like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet for more than half a century. Now, a group of the writers and artists he has inspired over the years have come together to celebrate his life and work in First Light. This anthology includes original contributions from David Almond, Margaret Atwood, John Burnside, Susan Cooper, Helen Dunmore, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Garner, Paul Kingsnorth, Katherine Langrish, Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane, Gregory Maguire, Neel Mukherjee, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith, Elizabeth Wein, Michael Wood and many, many more. Whether a literary essay, a personal response to Garner's writing or a story about the man himself, each piece is a tribute to his remarkable impact. Edited by the acclaimed journalist and novelist Erica Wagner, First Light will touch the heart of anyone who grew up reading Alan Garner.

Jeoffry was a real cat who lived 250 years ago, confined to an asylum with Christopher Smart, one of the most visionary poets of the age. In exchange for love and companionship, Smart rewarded Jeoffry with the greatest tribute to a feline ever written. Prize-winning biographer Oliver Soden combines meticulous research with passages of dazzling invention to recount the life of the cat praised as 'a mixture of gravity and waggery'. The narrative roams from the theatres and bordellos of Covent Garden to the cell where Smart was imprisoned for mania. At once whimsical and profound, witty and deeply moving, Soden's biography plays with the genre like a cat with a toy. It tells the story of a poet and a poem, while setting Jeoffry's life and adventures against the roaring backdrop of eighteenth-century London.