War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.

With an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. Tender is the Night is a story set in the hedonistic high society of Europe during the 'Roaring Twenties'. A wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver - her psychiatrist. The resulting saga of the Divers' troubled marriage, and their circle of friends, includes a cast of aristocratic and beautiful people, unhappy love affairs, a duel, incest, and the problems inherent in the possession of great wealth. Despite cataloguing a maelstrom of interpersonal conflict, Tender is the Night has a poignancy and warmth that springs from the quality of Fitzgerald's writing and the tragic personal experiences on which the novel is based. Six years separate Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon, the novel Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death in December 1940. Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood more or less continuously from July 1937 until his death, and a novel about the film industry at the height of 'the studio system' centred on the working life of a top producer was begun in 1939. Even in its incomplete state The Last Tycoon remains the greatest American novel about Hollywood and contains some of Fitzgerald's most brilliant writing.

Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.

Few twentieth-century American writers have been as influential as Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Whilst contemporaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner may be as widely taught and studied as Hemingway, neither had an influence on other writers-or indeed, the cognate arts-as great as that of Hemingway. For example, the 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction extending from the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to those of James Ellroy and Robert Parker is more or less inconceivable without Hemingway's stylistic influence. Arguably, film noir is also Hemingwayesque in its laconic detachment. And quite independently of his creative writings, Hemingway's life continues to exert a profound fascination for both student and the general reader. Hemingway was the subject of extensive enquiry before his death and since then he has generated interpretative and critical commentary on a vast and bewildering scale, in part aided by the continuing publication of works left unpublished at his death (most notably The Garden of Eden in 1987). The dizzying quantity (and variable quality) of Hemingway criticism makes it difficult to discriminate the useful from the tendentious, superficial, and otiose. That is why this new Routledge title is so urgently needed. In four volumes, the collection meets the need for an authoritative reference work to allow researchers and students to make sense of a vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Users will now be able easily and rapidly to locate the best and most influential critical scholarship, work that is otherwise often inaccessible or scattered throughout a variety of specialist journals and books. With material gathered into one easy-to-use set, researchers and students can now spend more of their time with the key journal articles, book chapters, and other pieces, rather than on time-consuming (and sometimes fruitless) archival searches. Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Ernest Hemingway is an essential reference work and is destined to be valued as a vital research resource.

Part of the "Critical Assessments of Writers in English" series, the aim of which is to provide complete collections of previously published, formative critical assessments covering the whole work of individual writers. The titles should be useful to serious readers of literature, researchers and advanced students. Many of the pieces included were originally published in journals or books which are now out of print or very difficult to obtain. Each set has an authoritative introductory survey, as well as a full bibliography and biographical details. This collection attempts to present as wide a view as possible of the William Faulkner's work, taking into account biographical, aesthetic and other concerns and, ultimately, allowing the reader to return to the original texts.