Over the final twenty years of his life, Mark Twain was an incredibly controversial figure. He evolved from the "clown prince of American literature" into a biting social critic and political observer. While some pundits hailed him as a satirist equal to Cervantes and Jonathan Swift, others excoriated him as a "degenerate literary freak" who wielded a "scurrilous and venomous pen." This volume traces the evolution of Mark Twain's public image between 1891 and his death in 1910. It features hundreds of reviews and other critical notices printed in magazines and newspapers across the U.S. and other English-speaking countries. This selected sample represents the full range of critical opinion, whether favorable or hostile, about Mark Twain's late writings. Sources reflect geographical differences in Twain's contemporary reputation, such as the conflicted responses in the British colonies towards Mark Twain's anti-imperialism and the pious disapproval in the American heartland for his attacks on foreign missions.

"It Can't Happen Here" is the only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of "Main Street, ""Babbitt," and "Arrowsmith." A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press. Called "a message to thinking Americans" by the" Springfield Republican" when it was published in 1935, "It Can't Happen Here "is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today's news.
With an Introduction by Michael Meyer
and a New Afterword

The Scarlet Letter is virtually unique among works of American fiction because it has not lapsed from print in over 140 years. The history of its reception, which is fully articulated in the volume introduction, may be read as a case study in canon formation. The collection of documents in the volume outline the highs and lows of Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary reputation and the elevation of his first and best-known romance to the rank of masterpiece and classic. Also included is a selective bibliography of modern scholarship. Among the early documents reprinted are contemporary news accounts of Hawthorne's dismissal from the Salem Custom House in June 1849, which provide the immediate background to "The Custom House" introduction in the story, the publisher James T. Fields's anecdotal version of the book's composition history, and a generous sheaf of notices from both American and British newspapers upon its publication in March, 1850. Of special value are the various essays and other materials that trace the institutionalization of the romance within the genteel tradition of American letters in the late nineteenth century. More recently, The Scarlet Letter has become something of an academic shibboleth, inspiring dozens of New Critical, psychoanalytical, feminist, and other readings, which are also represented in this collection. Prominent among modern critics whose essays appear are Neal Frank Doubleday, Darrel Abel, and Nina Baym. A number of reviews of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the story also underscore its stature as a cultural icon. This volume is essential for serious research on Nathaniel Hawthorne and provides a convenient body of valuable commentary accessibleeven to the student reading The Scarlet Letter for the first time.

In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck s vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California s back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators."

This is a comprehensive collection of authentic recipes, some 500 in all, for drinks and dishes that more than 150 American authors since the late 18th century are known to have enjoyed. The book should appeal to amateur chefs and so-called ""foodies"" who may want to test some of the recipes in their kitchens; to American literature instructors and scholars who may use it as a teaching tool; and general readers who will read it for pleasure. In effect, this is a celebrity cookbook to which many literary celebrities, living and dead, have contributed, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chavez, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Harland Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, Benjamin Franklin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, Lafcadio Hearn, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Elmore Leonard, Bobbie Ann Mason, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gertrude Stein, Onoto Watanna, Eudora Welty, Walt Whitman, and Gerald Vizenor.

Bret Harte was the best-known and highest-paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst's biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role. Harte's pioneering use of California local color in such stories as ""The Outcasts of Poker Flat"" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open eastern papers to contributions by Mark Twain and others. The popularity of Bret Harte's writings was driven largely by a literary market that his western stories helped create. The first Harte biography in nearly seventy years to be written entirely from primary sources, this book documents Harte's personal relationships and, in addition, his negotiations with various publishers, agents, and theatrical producers as he exploited popular interest in the American West.

Prominent American author, lecturer, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is best known for her 1898 treatise Women and Economics, which traced gender inequality to women's economic dependence upon men, and for her 1892 short story ""The Yellow Wall-Paper,"" which depicts a woman's descent into madness. However, she began her career as a poet. Her first authored book, a collection of verse entitled In This Our World, was issued in four different editions between 1893 and 1898. While virtually all of Gilman's later poems appeared in her monthly magazine, The Forerunner (1909-1916), or in The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996), Gilman's early verse has been largely inaccessible to modern readers, and dozens of her poems have never been collected. This volume, co-edited by Scharnhorst and Knight, includes all 149 poems in the 1898 edition of In This Our World as well as 79 vagrant poems that appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines. This critical volume features a comprehensive introduction, appendixes, and extensive notes. Gilman devotees and a new generation of readers will find this edition an indispensable resource.

No one knew how the blue-eyed, blond-haired white baby came to be abandoned, but the Crow tribe that found him raised him as one of its own. As he grew into adolescence, White Weasel was taken to Crooked-Bear, a white man who had long ago abandoned society for a solitary mountain existence and who acted as counselor to the Crow elders. Under Crooked-Bear's tutelage, White Weasel was schooled in white ways and rechristened John Ermine. Frederic Remington's compelling tale relates Ermine's successful reintroduction into white society, his heroic exploits as a scout in the military, and his growing interest in a white lady, Miss Katherine Searles. In his love for Katherine, Ermine must face the complexities and inequalities of American society. Although American culture may well laud Ermine's military prowess and personal integrity, since he is "wild" he can never truly rise through the ranks of society. It is inevitable that Ermine's story ends in tragedy.
"John Ermine of the Yellowstone" is both an epic Western in the classic sense and a complex tale that captures the conflict between European Americans and Native Americans in the Wild West. John Ermine is the tragic character caught between two cultures, unable to assimilate fully into either. Famed artist Frederic Remington uses his pen to convey the irreparable stalemate between two groups of people in an untamed West while making a moving argument for the preservation of a truly wild western front.

Drawing on his own combat experience with the Union forces, John W. De Forest crafted a war novel like nothing before it in the annals of American literature. His first-hand knowledge of "the wilderness of death" made its way on to the pages of his riveting novel with devastating effect. Whether depicting the tedium before combat, the unspoken horror of battle, or the grisly butchery of the field hospital, De Forest broke new ground, anticipating the realistic war writings of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Tim O'Brien.

A commercial failure in its own day, De Forest's story was praised by Henry James and William Dean Howells, who, comparing it favorably to War and Peace, acclaimed the book "one of the best American novels ever written."

In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger's most successful book, Alger codified the basic formula he would follow in nearly a hundred subsequent novels for boys: a young hero, inexperienced in the temptations of the city but morally armed to resist them, is unexpectedly forced to earn a livelihood. The hero's exemplary struggle - to retain his virtue, to clear his name of accusations, and to gain economic independence - was the basis of the Alger plot. Hugely popular at the turn of the twentieth century, Alger's works have at different times been framed as a model for the "American dream" and as dangerously exciting sensationalism for young readers; Gary Scharnhorst's new introduction separates the myth of Alger as "success ideologue" from the more complex messages conveyed in his work. Ragged Dick is paired in this edition with Risen from the Ranks, another coming-of-age story of a young man achieving respectability. Historical appendices include extensive contemporary reviews, material on the "success myth" associated with Alger, and parodies of Alger's work.

Twain scholar Michael Kiskis opens this fascinating new exploration of Twain with the observation that most readers have no idea that Samuel Clemens was the father of four and that he lived through the deaths of three of his children as well as his wife. In Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain's Fiction, Kiskis persuasively argues that not only was Mark Twain not, as many believe, "antidomestic," but rather the home and family were the muse and core message of his writing. Mark Twain was the child of a loveless marriage and a homelife over which hovered the constant specter of violence. Informed by his difficult childhood, orthodox readings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn frame these canonical literary figures as nostalgic-autobiographical fables of heroic individualists slipping the bonds of domestic life. Kiskis, however, presents a wealth of biographical details about Samuel Clemens and his family that reinterpret Twain's work as a robust affirmation of domestic spheres of life. Among Kiskis's themes are that, as the nineteenth century witnessed high rates of orphanhood and childhood mortality, Clemens's work often depicted unmoored children seeking not escape from home but rather seeking the redemption and safety available only in familial structures. Similarly, Mark Twain at Home demonstrates that, following the birth of his first daughter, Twain began to exhibit in his writing an anxiety with social ills, notably those that affected children. In vigorous and accessible descriptions of Twain's life as it became reflected in his prose, Kiskis offers a compelling and fresh understanding of this work of this iconic American author.

New in Paperback! Gilman (1860-1935), best known today for "The Yellow Wall-paper" and Women and Economics and a prolific writer, was virtually forgotten until the 1970s. Even now her publications are still largle inaccessible, and this first comprehensive bibliography traces the original appearances of her works, their republications, and their translations. Cloth edition published in 1985.

Designed for the general reader, this set presents literature not as a simple inventory of authors or titles but rather as a historical and cultural field viewed from a wide array of contemporary perspectives. The set, which is "new historicist" in its approach to literary criticism, endorses the notion that not only does history affect literature, but literature itself informs history.