Whitman is today regarded as America's Homer or Dante, and his work the touchstone for literary originality in the New World. In Leaves of Grass, he abandoned the rules of traditional poetry - breaking the standard metred line, discarding the obligatory rhyming scheme, and using the vernacular. Emily Dickinson condemned his sexual and physiological allusions as `disgraceful', but Emerson saw the book as the `most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed'. A century later it is his judgement of this autobiographical vision of the vigour of the American nation that has proved the more enduring. This is the most up-to-date edition for student use, with full critical apparatus. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Mark Twain, who was often photographed with a cigar, once remarked that he came into the world looking for a light. In this new biography, published on the centennial of the writer's death, Jerome Loving focuses on Mark Twain, humorist and quipster, and sheds new light on the wit, pathos, and tragedy of the author of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." In brisk and compelling fashion, Loving follows Twain from Hannibal to Hawaii to the Holy Land, showing how the southerner transformed himself into a westerner and finally a New Englander. This re-examination of Twain's life is informed by newly discovered archival materials that provide the most complex view of the man and writer to date.

Loving finds in the lives and works of the two writers a symbiosis of spirit that transcends the question of literary influence. Tracing the parallel careers of Emerson and Whitman, the author shows how each served his literary apprenticeship, moved beyond his vocation, prospered, and, finally, declined in his literary achievements. In both cases, Loving follows his subject from vision to wisdom and, along the way, examines the aspects of the relationship that have aroused controversy.
Originally published in 1982.
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In 1865 Walt Whitman was dismissed from his clerkship in the Department of the Interior because Secretary James Harlan judged Leaves of Grass indecent, unfit to be read aloud "by the evening lamp." Most eloquent among Whitman's defenders was William Douglas O'Connor, whose pamphlet The Good Gray Poet, a panegyric to Whitman and an attack on literary censorship in general and Harlan in particular, was the first of his many heroic if sometimes excessive efforts in Whitman's behalf. A gifted polemicist and a stout though not always judicious advocate of causes (he wrote several screeds favoring Bacon as the author of Shakespeare's works), O'Connor devoted much of his literary life to establishing Whitman and Leaves of Grass in the world of American letters. Whitman considered O'Connor his staunchest "literary believer and champion from the first and throughout . . . for twenty-five years," and indeed, despite a personal estrangement between the two men, O'Connor's support of Whitman the poet never wavered. O'Connor's own literary efforts may command little interest today, but his championship of Whitman as a great, original American poet rendered lasting service to literature. Appropriately, this study of his career is complemented by carefully annotated texts of six of his Whitman essays, including The Good Gray Poet. A complete O'Connor bibliography is also included.

McTeague (1899) chronicles the demise of a San Francisco couple at the end of the nineteenth century. Inspired by an actual crime that was sensationalized in the San Francisco papers, it tells the story of charlatan dentist McTeague, his wife Trina, and their spiralling descent into moral corruption. Norris is often considered to be the `American Zola', and this is one of the most purely naturalistic American novels of the nineteenth century. With its compelling portrayal of human nature at its most basic level, McTeague is a gripping and passionate tale of greed, degeneration and death. It is also one of the first major works of literature to set in California, and it provided the story for Erich von Stroheim's classic of the silent screen, Greed. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Mark Twain, who was often photographed with a cigar, once remarked that he came into the world looking for a light. In this new biography, published on the centennial of the writer's death, Jerome Loving focuses on Mark Twain, humorist and quipster, and sheds new light on the wit, pathos, and tragedy of the author of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." In brisk and compelling fashion, Loving follows Twain from Hannibal to Hawaii to the Holy Land, showing how the southerner transformed himself into a westerner and finally a New Englander. This re-examination of Twain's life is informed by newly discovered archival materials that provide the most complex view of the man and writer to date.

"Jerome Loving is a major American biographer, and he has taken up the life of a central literary figure in "The Last Titan. It is the best biographical study of Dreiser that has yet been written. Loving has an experienced hand, and he seems to know exactly where to go in the life, how to make the life available to the reader, and how to make one at least believe that this is how the great novels--"Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy--and the other fascinating works by Dreiser got written. Loving obviously knows everything there is to know about Dreiser, and he has made an elegant selection here, fashioning a life of the author that has all the narrative momentum of a novel."--Jay Parini, author of "Robert Frost: A Life"Jerome Loving has produced an immensely readable, lively, detailed account of Theodore Dreiser's life, always with one eye on Dreiser's great books. This is vivid biography, bringing the man very much to life. The streets, the newsrooms, the rented rooms, the yearning of the young Dreiser for money, fame, women, good things in life, keeps reminding the reader of Dreiser's own Carrie and Clyde."--Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of "Emerson: The Mind on Fire"Jerome Loving has a real gift for biography: he has the ability to draw both the big and the small picture and to bring them into mutual focus. While the major events in Dreiser's life are known, Loving brings an assortment of new details and intelligent conjecture to this compelling story. This will be the prevailing version of Dreiser's life."--Richard Lehan, author of "The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, and editor of "Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men

In Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story Professor Jerome Loving provides an intuitive and 'interiorized' reading of the poet's most important works. Using biographical matters as a frame for his interpretations, Loving demonstrates how Dickinson's life is bound up with any series reading of her work. Literally, Dickinson wrote on the second storey of her father's house, but Loving argues that she also used that 'story' (or art) as both a retreat from the transitory nature of life and as a way of experiencing life in what might be termed the 'subjunctive' instead of the 'imperative'. Her persona, therefore, is as disembodied in the poems as was the reclusive poet to visitors to the Amherst 'Homestead'. Loving attempts to show that the voice we hear in the poems is that of the 'mind alone', as Dickinson herself said, 'without corporeal friend'. Of interest to students and scholars of American literature, this critical study will also interest more general readers who enjoy Dickinson's poetry.

"Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself" is the first full-length critical biography of Walt Whitman in more than forty years. Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date. This authoritative biography affords fresh, often revelatory insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, his attitudes toward the vexed issue of race, and his insistence on the union of American states. Virtually every chapter presents material that was previously unknown or unavailable, and Whitman emerges as never before, in all his complexity as a corporal, cerebral, and spiritual being. Loving gives us a new Poet of Democracy, one for the twenty-first century. Loving brings to life the elusive early Whitman, detailing his unhappy teaching career, typesetting jobs, quarrels with editors, and relationships with family and friends. He takes us through the Civil War - with Whitman's moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed, the battlegrounds and camps he visited - demonstrating why the war became one of the defining events of Whitman's life and poetry. Loving's account of Whitman's relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most complete and fascinating available. He also draws insights from new material about Whitman's life as a civil servant, his Lincoln lectures, and his abiding campaign to gain acceptance for what was regarded by many as a 'dirty book.' He examines each edition of Leaves of Grass in connection with the life and times that produced it, demonstrating how Whitman's poetry serves as a priceless historical document - marking such events as Grant's death, the completion of the Washington monument, Custer's defeat, and the Johnstown flood - at the same time that it reshapes the canon of American literature. The most important gap in the Whitman record is his journalism, which has never been completely collected and edited. Previous biographers have depended on a very incomplete and inaccurate collection. Loving has found long-forgotten runs of the newspapers Whitman worked on and has gathered the largest collection of his journalism to date. He uses these pieces to significantly enhance our understanding of where Whitman stood in the political and ideological spectra of his era. Loving tracks down the sources of anecdotes about Whitman, how they got passed from one biographer to another, were embellished and re-contextualized. The result is a biography in which nothing is claimed without a basis in the factual record. "Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself" will be an invaluable tool for generations to come, an essential resource in understanding "Leaves of Grass" and its poet - who defied literary decorum, withstood condemnation, and stubbornly pursued his own way.