What is the connection between literature and leadership? Are leaders born or are they made? Elizabeth D. Samet, the author of the award-winning Soldier s Heart and a professor of English at West Point, brings to this anthology her profound experiences as a teacher of soldiers, her discerning ear for excellent writing, and her belief in the vital role of the humanities in cultivating leaders. Great writers and thinkers in conversation that is what makes Samet s approach distinctive. Samet organizes the writings around the essence of leadership the insights, skills, and actions that effective leaders, with time and experience, learn to live by. What are these insights, skills, and actions? Newcomers to any organization must first study the system, then find and emulate models, risk change, cultivate trust, negotiate, take responsibility, learn from failure, learn to resist, innovate, discipline desire, and eventually let go. These ideas, brought to life in selections written by or about unforgettable leaders be they heroic, quixotic, or villainous shape the book. Machiavelli, Macbeth, and Milosz, Ghandi and Gawande, Douglass and Didion are just a sampling of the 102 writers and works included. Readers of Leadership will enjoy its sheer variety at the same time that they enter a thought-provoking, often moving conversation that is both ancient and crucially current."

Originally published in 1885 by Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant's landmark memoir has been annotated by Elizabeth Samet in this lavish edition. No previous edition combines such a sweep of historical and cultural contexts with the literary authority that Samet, obsessed with Grant for decades, brings to the table. Whether exploring novels Grant read at West Point or presenting majestic images culled from archives, Samet curates a richly annotated edition. Never has Grant's transformation from tanner's son to military leader been more insightfully and passionately explained than in this timely edition, appearing on the 150th anniversary of Grant's 1868 presidential election.

This book highlights obedience as an American cultural motif by examining the ways in which citizens understand and dramatize the struggle between autonomy and allegiance. Willing Obedience tells the story of Americans who worked out the simultaneous demands of liberty and obedience in fiction, military memoir, and political writing from the Revolution through the nineteenth century. In contrast to the European model of a subject's blind obedience to a monarch, Americans imagined an allegiance that preserved autonomy even as they consented to the constraints of a new republic. In particular, the book considers the case of the soldier, whose surprisingly complex relationship to authority is in fact representative of the situation of all citizens in a republic.