This definitive dual portrait offers a fresh perspective on Abraham Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant's crucial role in elevating him to the presidency. The book also sheds new light on the influence that "Bryant and his class" (as Lincoln called the Radical Republican faction whose views Bryant articulated) wielded on the chief executive. How the cautious president and the preeminent editor of the Fourth Estate interacted-and how their ideological battle tilted gradually in Bryant's favor-is the centerpiece of this study. A work of meticulous scholarship and a model of compression, Lincoln and Bryant is a watershed account of two Republicans fighting common enemies (and each other) during the Civil War era.

During the 1930s, no event was more absorbing or galvanizing to Ernest Hemingway than the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway was passionately devoted to the cause of the democratically elected Spanish Republic and he spent much of the war reporting from its front lines, producing a deeply political body of work that illuminated the conflict and presaged the world war to come. In the end, his immersive journey into the turbulent world of the Spanish Civil War resulted in For Whom the Bell Tolls, a landmark in American political fiction. This book offers a fresh account of Hemingway's adventures in Spain during the Civil War, stressing his embrace of radical political action and discourse in defense of the Republic against the forces of Fascism. On the eightieth anniversary of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gilbert H. Muller reconsiders Hemingway as an engaged artist, political actor, and visionary.

This definitive dual portrait offers a fresh perspective on Abraham Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant's crucial role in elevating him to the presidency. The book also sheds new light on the influence that "Bryant and his class" (as Lincoln called the Radical Republican faction whose views Bryant articulated) wielded on the chief executive. How the cautious president and the preeminent editor of the Fourth Estate interacted-and how their ideological battle tilted gradually in Bryant's favor-is the centerpiece of this study. A work of meticulous scholarship and a model of compression, Lincoln and Bryant is a watershed account of two Republicans fighting common enemies (and each other) during the Civil War era.

During the 1930s, no event was more absorbing or galvanizing to Ernest Hemingway than the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway was passionately devoted to the cause of the democratically elected Spanish Republic and he spent much of the war reporting from its front lines, producing a deeply political body of work that illuminated the conflict and presaged the world war to come. In the end, his immersive journey into the turbulent world of the Spanish Civil War resulted in For Whom the Bell Tolls, a landmark in American political fiction. This book offers a fresh account of Hemingway's adventures in Spain during the Civil War, stressing his embrace of radical political action and discourse in defense of the Republic against the forces of Fascism. On the eightieth anniversary of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gilbert H. Muller reconsiders Hemingway as an engaged artist, political actor, and visionary.

Historians and social scientists have frequently examined the impact of post-war immigration on American culture. Until now, literary critics have not.

New Strangers in Paradise offers the first in-depth account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive weaves of immigrants to reach U.S. shores in the past fifty years. Gilbert Muller reveals how the intersections of peoples, regions, and competing cultural histories have remade the American cultural landscape in the aftermath of World War II.

Muller focuses on Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Carribeans, and Asian Americans. In their quest for an American identity, each of these groups has sought and revitalized the America dream of riches and bounty for all.

The successive waves of immigrants are examined in the cultural and historical context both on America and of the lands from which they originated. Muller offers a fresh perspective on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others. These writers cross and recross national boundaries, creating a new canon that reveals the evolution of a multi-cultural, pluralistic, incipiently transnational civilization.