A revelatory look at the life of the great American author--and how it shaped his most beloved works

Jack London was born a working class, fatherless Californian in 1876. In his youth, he was a boundlessly energetic adventurer on the bustling West Coast--an oyster pirate, a hobo, a sailor, and a prospector by turns. He spent his brief life rapidly accumulating the experiences that would inform his acclaimed bestselling books "The Call of the""Wild," "White Fang," and "The Sea-Wolf."

The bare outlines of his story suggest a classic rags-to-riches tale, but London the man was plagued by contradictions. He chronicled nature at its most savage, but wept helplessly at the deaths of his favorite animals. At his peak the highest paid writer in the United States, he was nevertheless forced to work under constant pressure for money. An irrepressibly optimistic crusader for social justice and a lover of humanity, he was also subject to spells of bitter invective, especially as his health declined. Branded by shortsighted critics as little more than a hack who produced a couple of memorable dog stories, he left behind a voluminous literary legacy, much of it ripe for rediscovery.

In "Jack London: An American Life," the noted Jack London scholar Earle Labor explores the brilliant and complicated novelist lost behind the myth--at once a hard-living globe-trotter and a man alive with ideas, whose passion for seeking new worlds to explore never waned until the day he died. Returning London to his proper place in the American pantheon, Labor resurrects a major American novelist in his full fire and glory.

The memoirs of Ernest Forssgren (1894-1970), the young Swede who served as Marcel Proust's last valet, provide new insights into Proust's life and death. Previously, Forssgren's memoir has been published only in excerpts, in French, with serious omissions and alterations.
This book presents the complete text of the memoir, with an introduction and helpful annotations by the distinguished Proust scholar William C. Carter. Also included here is other new material: the inscriptions that Proust wrote for Forssgren's copy of "Swann's Way;" an important telegram that Proust sent Forssgren, which defines with greater precision the novelist's activities in the final months of his life; Forssgren's "Summary" of the first English biography of Proust, by George D. Painter, which provides many new details about Proust's last trip to Cabourg in 1914 and his attempts at seducing young men of the servant class; and the notes that Forssgren made in his copy of Painter's biography.

Great blue herons, yellow birches, damselflies, and beavers are among the talismans by which Bill Roorbach uncovers a natural universe along the stream that runs by his house in Farmington, Maine. Populated by an oddball cast of characters to whom Roorbach ("The Professor") and his family might always be considered outsiders, this book chronicles one man's determined effort-occasionally with hilarious results-to follow his stream to its elusive source. Acclaimed essayist and award-winning fiction writer Bill Roorbach uses his singular literary gifts to inspire us to laugh, love, and experience the wonder of living side by side with the natural world.

Maxims and Reflections is a collection of several hundred brilliant, unforgettable paragraphs and aphorisms by the legendary German Renaissance writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, divided into the categories Life and Character, Literature and Art, Science and Nature. Like the Manual of Epictetus and Seneca s Letters, Goethe s Maxims and Reflections is a timeless guide to navigating the mysteries of existence.

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. At the end of 2004, following the death of Christie's daughter, Rosalind, a remarkable legacy was revealed: seventy-three handwritten volumes of notes, lists, and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays, and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in the beloved author's unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.

Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own autobiography, this remarkable book includes a wealth of excerpts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters--plus, two complete, recently discovered Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.

One of the most prolific African American authors of his time, John A. Williams (1925-2015) made his mark as a journalist, educator, and writer. Having worked for Newsweek, Ebony, and Jet magazines, Williams went on to write twelve novels and numerous works of nonfiction. A vital link between the Black Arts movement and the previous era, Williams crafted works of fiction that relied on historical research as much as his own finely honed skills. From The Man Who Cried I Am, a roman a clef about expatriate African American writers in Europe, to Clifford's Blues, a Holocaust novel told in the form of the diary entries of a gay, black, jazz pianist in Dachau, these representations of black experiences marginalized from official histories make him one of our most important writers. Conversations with John A. Williams collects twenty-three interviews with the three-time winner of the American Book Award, beginning with a discussion in 1969 of his early works and ending with a previously unpublished interview from 2005. Gathered from print periodicals as well as radio and television programs, these interviews address a range of topics, including anti-black violence, Williams's WWII naval service, race and publishing, interracial romance, Martin Luther King Jr., growing up in Syracuse, the Prix de Rome scandal, traveling in Africa and Europe, and his reputation as an angry black writer. The conversations prove valuable given how often Williams drew from his own life and career for his fiction. They display the integrity, social engagement, and artistic vision that make him a writer to be reckoned with.

Oscar Wilde's reputation has shifted dramatically during the twentieth century from outcast in the wake of his trials for homosexual offences, to martyr to the gay cause in the 1980s and 90s, to important figure in the history of writing in English. Ruth Robbins introduces Wilde through a focus on his manipulations of genre and sets Wilde's life and work in its literary and cultural context, including the history of Victorian drama; the contexts of criticism in the period; poetry as post-romantic and pre-modernist mode of expression; the uses and subversions of fictional forms in his work; and his subversion of the autobiographical mode in his prison letter De Profundis. This comprehensive and readable introduction offers readers and students a lively and informative guide to Wilde's significance in the context of his own time and his extensive afterlife in literature, criticism and popular culture.

Daphne du Maurier's correspondence with Oriel Malet began in the early 1950s, after they met at a cocktail party in London. At least twenty years separated them: Oriel was a gauche young writer while Daphne was the famous, much-feted author of bestselling novels including Jamaica Inn, My Cousin Rachel, and Rebecca. The friendship flourished for thirty years, fed by the letters that arrived faithfully from Menabilly, the du Maurier house in Cornwall. While Oriel tasted life on a houseboat on the Seine and mixed with the aristocratic Who's Who of Paris, Daphne's letters tell of her family, past and present, her marriage to General Sir Frederick Browning-a war hero known privately as 'Moper' whose fits of melancholy caused many a crisis at Menabilly-and events like Prince Philip coming for dinner: 'We've got only four knives with handles, and one silver candlestick must be glued!' Most of all, her letters are a valuable record of the complex and rigorous art of a fine and well-loved writer: the 'brewing' of a plot, the research, and the 'pegging' of secret fantasies onto a living person in order to create classical characters such as Cousin Rachel and Roger Kylmerth. Disarmingly frank about sex, an earnest seeker after spiritual and psychological truth, Daphne du Maurier is revealed in her letters as an inspiring and delightful correspondent-as well as a once-in-a-lifetime friend.

Born Elsie Dunn in 1893 Clarksville, Tennessee, Evelyn Scott lived a tumultuous life that took her to New York, Brazil, western Europe, and the Caribbean. She published twelve novels during her lifetime and was a notable literary figure in the 1920s and 1930s. Published in 1937 alongside her penultimate novel, Background in Tennessee is an autobiographical work devoted to Scott's Tennessee birthplace, her family's history, and her broad view of Southern history. Her wide-ranging exploration of the south interweaves Scott's personal history with discussions of colonial settlement of the region, local leadership of Clarksville and the larger Nashville area, and race relations. In this new edition, Bill Hardwig provides an analytical introduction that guides the reader through Scott's intricate and winding exploration of early twentieth-century Tennessee and her own past. He notes at once Scott's ambivalence toward her native South and yet the nostalgia with which she recounts personal memories. Complicated yet critical to a full understanding of Evelyn Scott and her literary legacy, this edition of Background in Tennessee makes available an important voice in Tennessee's literary history for a new generation.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
"San Francisco Chronicle - "Newsweek/The Daily Beast - "The Seattle Times - The Economist - Kansas City Star - BookPage"
On February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word "fatwa." His crime? To have written a novel called "The Satanic Verses, " which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran."
So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov--"Joseph Anton."
How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom.
It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.
Praise for "Joseph Anton"
"A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie's work throughout his career."--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year."--Jonathan Yardley, "The Washington Post"
" "
"Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book.""--USA Today"
"Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie's ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism.""--The Wall Street Journal"
" "
"Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written.""--The Independent" (UK)
"A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty.""--Le Point "(France)
"Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie's eye is a camera lens --firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus."--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book."--"de Volkskrant "(The Netherlands)
"One of the best memoirs you may ever read."--"DNA "(India)
"Extraordinary . . . "Joseph Anton" beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing--at all costs--any curtailment on a writer's freedom."--"The Boston Globe"

Margaret Mitchell was as complex and compelling as her legendary heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, and her story is as dramatic as anything out of her own imagination-indeed, it is the basis for the legend she created. Gone With the Wind took the American reading public by storm and went on to become the most popular motion picture of all time. It was a phenomenon whose success has never been equaled-and it shattered Margaret Mitchell's private life. In this commemorative reprint of Road to Tara, Anne Edwards tells the real story of Margaret Mitchell and the extraordinary novel that has become part of our heritage.

At the age of nineteen Arthur Rimbaud committed suicide, not in the flesh but as a writer. At that point he had composed a body of poetry now ranked among the classics of France and of the world. He never wrote another line. He cut himself not only from literature but from his native country and from European civilization, and lost himself in the inaccessible mountains of North Africa. When he reappeared it was to die, in torment, in a hospital on the coast. Further research has reconstructed the 'lost' life of this extraordinary man and his amazing second career. Traveling as a trader under terrible difficulties, he acted unknowingly as a pioneer agent of the French Empire. The routes he discovered became military and commercial highways of the French Empire in North Africa. Jean Marie Carre has written the first complete and authoritative biography of this genius and adventurer. It opens the mystery of Rimbaud's renunciation, a profound research into a tortured soul woven into a powerful narrative of his adventures in Africa. Also included in this volume is a translation of Rimbaud's moving spiritual autobiography A Season in Hell.

He has been called passionate and violent, cryptic and probing, hostile and eloquent. His works have been called brilliant and unbearable, poetic and documentary, classic and controversial. He is a major voice of the Civil Rights Movement. His words, which have compelled, agitated and hypnotized a nation, are now heard around the world. That is the public image of James Baldwin. But there is also an aspect of Baldwin that grew out of self-deprecation and a search for personal identity; a timorous side that his mother worried over in the presence of a step-father who would not acknowledge him, and that his teachers watched carefully because there was precocity beneath it, trying to force its way out. There was a child who thought he was ugly and useless, who was overly self-conscious about his appearance and couldn't find the love he needed to make his own existence bearable. There is a man who claims: "I've been scared to death since I was born and I'll be scared till I die. But if you're scared to death, walk toward it." And there is an author whose tremendous impact on American literature-and American life-has, until now, not been fully measured. Fern Marja Eckman has based this vivid book on hours and hours of taped interviews with Baldwin and with the people who are significant in his story. She presents a detailed account of Baldwin's Harlem childhood, a portrait of the exile who returned to his country to shock it into reappraisal of its racial and sexual attitudes, and an inside view of his part in Robert Kennedy's civil-rights meeting in 1963. Speaking with James Baldwin and probing the complex mixture of extreme hate and intense love that characterize him, she presents a profile told largely in his own words-one which is essentially Baldwin on Baldwin.

Monk's House in Sussex is the former home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. It was bought by them in 1919 as a country retreat, somewhere they came to read, write and work in the garden. From the overgrown land behind the house they created a brilliant patchwork of garden rooms, linked by brick paths, secluded behind flint walls and yew hedges. The story of this magical garden is the subject of this book and the author has selected quotations from the writings of the Woolfs which reveal how important a role the garden played in their lives, as a source of both pleasure and inspiration. Virginia wrote most of her major novels at Monk's House, at first in a converted tool shed, and later in her purpose-built wooden writing lodge tucked into a corner of the orchard. Caroline Zoob lived with her husband, Jonathan, at Monk's House for over a decade as tenants of the National Trust, and has an intimate knowledge of the garden they tended and planted. The photographer, Caroline Arber, was a frequent visitor to the house during their tenancy and her spectacular photographs, published here for the first time, often reveal the garden as it is never seen by the public: at dawn, in the depths of winter, at dusk. The photographs and text, enriched with rare archive images and embroidered garden plans, take the reader on a journey through the various garden 'rooms', (including the Italian Garden, the Fishpond Garden, the Millstone Terrace and the Walled Garden). Each garden room is presented in the context of the lives of the Woolfs, with fascinating glimpses into their daily routines at Rodmell. This beautiful book is an absorbing account of the creation of a garden which will appeal equally to gardeners and those with an interest in Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

Sharing what he’s learnt during half a century’s creative work, John Greening gives us an insight into the life of a poet, playwright, editor, reviewer, teacher and performer. Eminently readable, amusing and informative, A High Calling is a rich resource for anyone with an interest in good writing.

Navigating a wide-ranging career, including a spell as a children’s magician and a time at the BBC with musicologist Hans Keller, as well as years spent living in Upper Egypt, we are taken on a journey around the globe and through time and literature. With an extraordinary cast of poets, including correspondence with Ted Hughes and a meeting with Seamus Heaney at Little Gidding, Greening paints a compelling portrait of the lives behind the writers we meet.

Rich in anecdote and literary insight and interwoven with autobiographical sketches and original poems, A High Calling is anything but lofty in its approach, and is chock-full with down-to-earth advice for readers and writers.

The Shelf2Life Literature and Fiction Collection is a unique set of short stories, poems and novels from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. From tales of love, life and heartbreaking loss to humorous stories of ghost encounters, these volumes captivate the imaginations of readers young and old. Included in this collection are a variety of dramatic and spirited poems that contemplate the mysteries of life and celebrate the wild beauty of nature. The Shelf2Life Literature and Fiction Collection provides readers with an opportunity to enjoy and study these iconic literary works, many of which were written during a period of remarkable creativity.

In the late 1890s, Vartanoosh Tarzian escapes with her parents from Turkish massacres in their province of Erzeroum, Armenia, to Beirut, the little girl and her brother riding in saddlebags on a camel. Left in Syria in the care of a bachelor uncle while her mother emigrates to America and her father travels to England for medical treatment, she finally rejoins her mother in New York City in 1903. Vartanoosh is placed in The Sheltering Arms, an Episcopal home for "half-orphans" in what is now Harlem, where she learns to speak, write and read English and is taught American customs and hygiene. Returning to her parents' home, she comes to know Thomas Alva Edison while working in their tailor shop in Orange, New Jersey. Although her dream is to become a nurse, her parents insist that she marry, which she does in 1913, shepherding her family of six children through two World Wars and the Depression. "VARTANOOSH" is the true story of a remarkable, independent woman, told amidst a rich tapestry of Armenian customs and life in Armenia and America.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil's foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado's writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. G. Reginald Daniel, an expert on Brazilian race relations, takes a fresh look at how Machado's writings were inflected by his life--especially his experience of his own racial identity. The result is a new interpretation that sees Machado as endeavoring to transcend his racial origins by universalizing the experience of racial ambiguity and duality into a fundamental mode of human existence.