A New York Times Notable Book of 2013 A Kirkus Best Book of 2013 A Bookpage Best Book of 2013Dazzling in scope, Ecstatic Nation illuminates one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in America's past, when the country dreamed big, craved new lands and new freedom, and was bitterly divided over its great moral wrong: slavery.â ¨ â ¨With a canvas of extraordinary characters, such as P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and L. C. Q. Lamar, Ecstatic Nation brilliantly balances cultural and political history: It's a riveting account of the sectional conflict that preceded the Civil War, and it astutely chronicles the complex aftermath of that war and Reconstruction, including the promise that women would share in a new definition of American citizenship. It takes us from photographic surveys of the Sierra Nevadas to the discovery of gold in the South Dakota hills, and it signals the painful, thrilling birth of modern America.An epic tale by award-winning author Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation lyrically and with true originality captures the optimism, the failures, and the tragic exuberance of a renewed Republic.

The first book to portray one of the most remarkable friendships in American letters, that of Emily Dickinson--recluse, poet--and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister, literary figure, active abolitionist.
Their friendship began in 1862. The Civil War was raging. Dickinson was thirty-one; Higginson, thirty-eight. A former pastor at the Free Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, he wrote often for "the" cultural magazine of the day, "The" "Atlantic Monthly"--on gymnastics, women's rights, and slavery. His article "Letter to a Young Contributor" gave advice to readers who wanted to write for the magazine and offered tips on how to submit one's work ("use black ink, good pens, white paper").
Among the letters Higginson received in response was one scrawled in looping, difficult handwriting. Four poems were enclosed in a smaller envelope. He deciphered the scribble: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"
Higginson read the poems. The writing was unique, uncategorizable. It was clear to him that this was "a wholly new and original poetic genius," and the memory of that moment stayed with him when he wrote about it thirty years later.
Emily Dickinson's question inaugurated one of the least likely correspondences in American letters--between a man who ran guns to Kansas, backed John Brown, and would soon command the first Union regiment of black soldiers, and the eremitic, elusive poet who cannily told him she did not cross her "Father's ground to any House or town."
For the next quarter century, until her death in 1886, Dickinson sent Higginson dazzling poems, almost one hundred of them--many of them her best. Their metrical forms were unusual, theirpunctuation unpredictable, their images elliptical, innovative, unsentimental. Poetry torn up by the roots, Higginson later said, that "gives the sudden transitions."
Dickinson was a genius of the faux-naif variety, reclusive to be sure but more savvy than one might imagine, more self-conscious and sly, and certainly aware of her outsize talent. "Dare you see a Soul at the 'White Heat'?" she wondered. She dared, and he did.
In this shimmering, revelatory work, Brenda Wineapple re-creates the extraordinary, delicate friendship that led to the publication of Dickinson's poetry. And though she and Higginson met face-to-face only twice (he had never met anyone "who drained my nerve power so much," he said), their friendship reveals much about Dickinson, throwing light onto both the darkened door of the poet's imagination and a corner of the noisy century that she and Colonel Higginson shared.
"White Heat" is about poetry, politics, and love; it is, as well, a story of seclusion and engagement, isolation and activism--and the way they were related--in the roiling America of the nineteenth century.

The young journalist and reformer Horace Traubel visited Whitman nearly every day at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman liked to talk, especially about the big issues, spiritual, political - all he'd learned over seven decades of peace and war. To mark the bicentenary of Walt Whitman's death, Carcanet presents Brenda Wineapple's distillation from these conversations with the great American poet. Whitman speaks from the heart, an old man who changed the course of American poetry and, by extension, the poetries of Europe, Asia, Latin America. Here, too, is the poet's worldly side - recalling the opprobrium heaped on Leaves of Grass for its poetic risks and sexual frankness; memories of Thoreau, Emerson and Lincoln; his judgments of Shakespeare, Goethe and Tolstoy; and his sense of the Nation.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables" is a classic of American literature, written by one of America's greatest writers. First published in 1851, the book is set in a mansion not unlike his cousin's many-gabled home in Salem, Massachusetts, which Hawthorne visited regularly. Hawthorne believed "the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones" and Hawthorne's story depicts the memorable lives of the residents of the house who were inextricably bound to the sins of their ancestors. Today, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion is popularly known as the House of the Seven Gables, is on The National Register of Historic Places, and is a museum open to the public.

For 50 years, under the pen-name of Genet, Janet Flanner described the political, artistic and social life of Paris after World War I. She knew and saw people and events from Edith Wharton to Ernest Hemingway, from Charles Lindbergh's landing to Josephine Baker's debut. She wrote of the culture, the celebrities and the scandals of Paris and the wider Europe, and profiled de Gaulle, Picasso, Malraux, Mann and Hitler for her New Yorker readers.;In Paris the American-born Flanner found the freedom to live and love as she chose, and her personal life was as passionate and complex as her public one. This book chronicles Flanner's lifelong relationship with Solita Solano and the turbulent love affairs of her later life.;A chain-smoking, hard-driven perfectionist, Janet Flanner won the 1966 US National Book Award for "Paris Journal". In this literary biography, Brenda Wineapple brings to life the intense, compelling woman who, sporting a monocle, came to be synonymous with the bittersweet romance of the Parisian Left Bank.

Devoted, eccentric, and compelling, Gertrude and Leo Stein were constant companions, from childhood to adulthood, until, finally, they spoke no more. Americans, expatriates, and virtually orphans, they lived together for almost forty years, collaborating in one of the great artistic and literary adventures of the twentieth century. Sister Brother tells the story of that adventure and relationship. With a personality that drew people toward her-regardless of what they thought of her inventive, hermetic prose-Gertrude Stein dazzled and perplexed. Enigmatic, intelligent, and self-absorbed, Leo also dazzled but in his own way. One of the crucial figures in Gertrude's early years, he was the original guiding spirit of the famed salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, which continued for almost two decades. From her early days as a medical student to her first days in Paris, Gertrude was passionately driven toward the career in which she distinguished herself, demanding appreciation as an exceptional writer who knew precisely what she intended. This book shows how Gertrude slowly struggled with what became a unique voice-and why her brother spurned it. With its wealth of new and rare material, its reconstruction of Leo's famed art collection, and its array of characters-from Bernard Berenson to Pablo Picasso-this biography offers the first glimpse into the smoldering sibling relationship that helped form two of the twentieth century's most unusual figures. Brenda Wineapple is the author of Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner and Hawthorne: A Life, which received the English-Speaking Union's Ambassador Award for the Best Biography of 2003 and the Boston Book Club's Julia Ward Howe Award. She teaches writing in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and the MFA program at the New School University in New York.

Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. "Deep as Dante," Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not "one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit" for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. "He always puts himself in his books," said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, "he cannot help it." His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.
In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein ("Luminous"-Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them-he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.
Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.
Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.
Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne's fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children's books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.

"From the Hardcover edition."

The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genet. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.

Dark, weird, psychologically complex, Hawthorne s short fiction continues to fascinate readers. Brenda Wineapple has made a generous selection of Hawthorne s stories, including some of his best-known tales as well as other, less-often anthologized gems. In her introduction, she explores a writer whose best stories, as Wineapple has elsewhere observed, penetrate the secret horrors of ordinary life, those interstices in the general routine where suddenly something or someone shifts out of place, changing everything.

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative texts of Hawthorne s stories in "The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne."