Six years before she wrote Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, in financial straits, entered "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," a novelette, in a newspaper contest. Not only did it win the $100 prize, but, published anonymously, it marked the first in the series of "blood & thunder tales" that would be her livelihood for years.

In Behind a Mask, editor Madeleine Stern introduces four Alcott thrillers: "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," "The Mysterious Key," "The Abbot's Ghost," and the title story, "Behind a Mask." First published in one volume in 1975, they are regarded as Alcott's finest work in this genre.

Louisa May Alcott once wrote that she had taken her pen for a bridegroom. Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, friends and business partners for fifty years, have in many ways taken up their pens and passion for literature much in the same way. The "Holmes & Watson" of the rare book business, Rostenberg and Stern are renowned for unlocking the hidden secret of Louisa May Alcott's life when they discovered her pseudonym, A.M. Barnard, along with her anonymously published "blood and thunder" stories on subjects like transvestitism, hashish smoking, and feminism.

Old Books, Rare Friends describes their mutual passion for books and literary sleuthing as they take us on their earliest European book buying jaunts. Using what they call Finger-spitzengefühl, the art of evaluating antiquarian books by handling, experience, and instinct, we are treated to some of their greatest discoveries amid the mildewed basements of London's booksellers after the Blitz. We experience the thrill of finding one of the earliest known books printed in America between 1617-1619 by the Pilgrim Press and learn about the influential role of publisher-printers from the fifteenth century.

Like a precious gem, Old Books, Rare Friends is a book to treasure about the companionship of two rare friends and their shared passion for old books.

Madeleine B. Stern, one of the world's leading Alcott scholars, shows how the breadth of Alcott's work, ranging from Little Women to sensational thrillers and war stories, serves as a reflection of a fascinating and complicated life dotted with poverty and riches alike, hard menial work, physical suffering relieved by opiates, and the acclaim of literary success.

From her eleventh year to the month of her death at age 55, Louisa May Alcott kept copious journals. She never intended for them to be published, but the insights they provide into her remarkable life are invaluable. Alcott grew up in a genteel but impoverished household, surrounded by the literary and philosophical elite of 19th-century New England, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like her fictional alter ego, Jo March, she was a free spirit who longed for independence, yet she dutifully supported her parents and three sisters with her literary efforts. In the journals are to be found hints of Alcott's surprisingly complex persona as well as clues to her double life as an author not only of ""high"" literature but also of serial thrillers and Gothic romances. This unabridged edition of Alcott's private diaries serves as a companion volume to ""The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott"", offering a record of the life of an extraordinary woman.

The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott contains a broad cross-section of letters from the correspondence of the creator of Little Women and provides a compelling autobiography of this most autobiographical of writers. Spanning a period of forty-five years, this collection provides vivid accounts of Alcott's life and development as a writer. Episodes in Alcott's life are candidly reflected: her youth, when the prototype of Jo March was already being shaped; the 1868 publication of Little Women and the prosperity and renown the book brought its author; her never-ending struggles for her family; the final years spent caring for her niece and an invalid father. Alcott's letters also furnished a vent for the pressures she felt to write a sequel to Little Women and play matchmaker for the novel's heroine. Writing to a friend in early 1869, Alcott remarked that "Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didnt dare to refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her. I expect vials of wrath to be poured out upon my head, but rather enjoy the prospect." The correspondence sheds light on Alcott's relationship with her publishers, such friends as Emerson and Thoreau, and members of her family. Of particular note are her observations--many of them firsthand--on such major issues of the day as abolition, the Civil War, and the women's rights movement.

Famous for her classic novel Little Women, and regarded as America's best-loved author of juvenile fiction, Louisa May Alcott is not readily identified with page-turning thrillers and sensational tales. Freaks of Genius, however, presents a collection of previously unknown sensational narratives by Alcott, originally published in the weekly storypapers of the 1860s and never before reprinted. The stories are startling examples of an atypical Alcott, delving into such subjects as violence and insanity, revenge and murder, and narcotics addiction and evil. Included in the collection are six of Alcott's tales of the sensational: A Nurse's Story, The Freak of a Genius, La Jeune, A Laugh and a Look, The Romance of a Bouquet, and Mrs. Vane's Charade. Their themes include the blight of inherited insanity, the power struggle between man and man, the sexual power struggle between man and woman, a Faustian/Mephistophelian pact (later used in A Modern Mephistopheles), the passions of actors and actresses, and feminist triumphs and failures. These skillfully plotted stories are sure to interest the general reader with their narrative excitement, and to fascinate the scholar trying to reconcile their darkness with the sweetness and light tone that has always been associated with Alcott's work. In addition, the book includes the first complete bibliography of Alcott's known thrillers, both anonymous and pseudonymous. For libraries, general readers, and courses such as American literature and feminist studies, Freaks of Genius will be an essential publication.

This acclaimed biography of Margaret Fuller, first published nearly five decades ago, is now available in a new, expanded edition. Based on Fuller's detailed journals and other writings, it records the life and experiences of a literary critic, radical educator, and outspoken feminist who was deeply involved in the political, spiritual, and cultural ferment that characterized mid-nineteenth century America. It also provides a comprehensive update on recent scholarship and documentary materials that have come to light since the biography's original publication. Madeleine Stern examines Fuller's Massachusetts background, her friendship and literary collaboration with Ralph Waldo Emerson, her feminist writings, and her role as an educator of women. Universal in her interests, Fuller also concerned herself with the new "sciences" of phrenology and animal magnetisim, the advancement of the arts in Boston, the last stand of the Indians of the West, and the ill-fated Italian Republic. She became more widely known as the literary critic on Greeley's New York Tribune and later as America's first woman foreign correspondent. Stern includes a detailed chronology of Fuller's life and a review of Fuller scholarship, including biographies, editions of Fuller's works, and documentary sources. Drawn entirely from facts and impressions recorded by Margaret Fuller herself, this work provides a uniquely lifelike portrait, as well as the carefully researched resource for women's social history and the social, spiritual, and intellectual history of nineteenth-century America.

Louisa May Alcott has always been associated with literature for young adults and children. Here is in effect a new book by the universally popular Alcott, a book that reveals an altogether different image of one of America's best-loved authors. "A Modern MephistopheleS" began as a rejected sensational novel and was revised by Alcott for anonymous publication in 1877. Its subject, style, and language mark radical deviations from those expected of Alcott.

"Taming a Tartar" is a newly discovered Alcott thriller. Originally published as a serialization in Frank Leslie's "Illustrated Magazine," this astounding page-turner highlights Alcott's feminists leanings. This unique book marks the first general printing of an Alcott story and the first reprinting in some 75 years of a neglected Alcott novel. Both works are closely analyzed in the detailed introduction by Madeleine B. Stern.

Louisa May Alcott has always been associated with literature for young adults and children. Here is in effect a new book by the universally popular Alcott, a book that reveals an altogether different image of one of America's best-loved authors. A Modern Mephistopheles began as a rejected sensational novel and was revised by Alcott for anonymous publication in 1877. Its subject, style, and language mark radical deviations from those expected of Alcott. Taming a Tartar is a newly discovered Alcott thriller. Originally published as a serialization in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Magazine, this astounding page-turner highlights Alcott's feminists leanings. This unique book marks the first general printing of an Alcott story and the first reprinting in some 75 years of a neglected Alcott novel. Both works are closely analyzed in the detailed introduction by Madeleine B. Stern.

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An abolitionist and a champion of free love and women's rights would seem decidedly out of place in nineteenth-century Texas, but such a man was Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812-1886), American reformer, civil rights proponent, pioneer in sociology, advocate of reformed spelling, lawyer, and eccentric philosopher. Since his life mirrored and often anticipated the various reform movements spawned not only in Texas but in the United States in the nineteenth century, this first biography of him sharply reflects and elucidates his times. The extremely important role Andrews played in the abolition movement in this country has not heretofore been accorded him. After having witnessed slavery in Louisiana during the 1830s, Andrews came to Texas and began his career as an abolitionist with an audacious attempt to free the slaves there. His singular career, however, comprised many more activities than abolitionism, and most have long been forgotten by historians. He introduced Pitman shorthand into the United States as a means of teaching the uneducated to read; his role in the community of Modern Times, Long Island, was as important as that of Josiah Warren, the "first American anarchist," although Andrews's participation in this communal venture, along with the significance of Modern Times itself, has been underestimated. Other causes which Andrews supported included free love and the rights of women, dramatized by his journalistic debate with Horace Greeley and Henry James, Sr., and by his endorsement of Victoria Woodhull as the first woman candidate for the Presidency of the United States. These interests, together with his consequent involvement in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal, provide insight into some of the more colorful aspects of nineteenth-century American reform movements. Andrews's attacks upon whatever infringed on individual freedom brought him into diverse arenas-economic, sociological, and philosophical. The philosophical system he developed included among its tenets the sovereignty of the individual, a science of society, a universal language (his Alwato long preceded Esperanto), the unity of the sciences, and a "Pantarchal United States of the World." His philosophy has never before been epitomized nor have its applications to later thought been considered. "I have made it the business of my life to study social laws," Andrews wrote. "I see now a new age beginning to appear." This biography of the dynamic reformer examines those social laws and that still-unembodied new age. It reanimates a heretofore neglected American reformer and casts new light upon previously unexplored bypaths of nineteenth-century American social history. The biography is fully documented, based in part upon a corpus of unpublished material in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.