Critic, poet, editor, chronicler of the "lost generation," and elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) was an eloquent witness to much of twentieth-century American literary and political life. These letters, the vast majority previously unpublished, provide an indelible self-portrait of Cowley and his time, and make possible a full appreciation of his long and varied career. Perhaps no other writer aided the careers of so many poets and novelists. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, and John Cheever are among the many authors Cowley knew and whose work he supported. A poet himself, Cowley enjoyed the company of writers and knew how to encourage, entertain, and when necessary scold them. At the center of his epistolary life were his friendships with Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, and Edmund Wilson. By turns serious and thoughtful, humorous and gossipy, Cowley's letters to these and other correspondents display his keen literary judgment and ability to navigate the world of publishing. The letters also illuminate Cowley's reluctance to speak out against Stalin and the Moscow Trials when he was on staff at The New Republic--and the consequences of his agonized evasions. His radical past would continue to haunt him into the Cold War era, as he became caught up in the notorious "Lowell Affair" and was summoned to testify in the Alger Hiss trials. Hans Bak supplies helpful notes and a preface that assesses Cowley's career, and Robert Cowley contributes a moving foreword about his father.

As Malcolm Cowley says in his introduction, the first edition of Leaves of Grass 'might be called the buried masterpiece of American writing', for it exhibits 'Whitman at his best, Whitman at his freshest in vision and boldest in language, Whitman transformed by a new experience.' Mr Cowley has taken the first edition from its narrow circulation among scholars, faithfully edited it, added his own introduction and Whitman's original introduction (which never appeared in any other edition during Whitman's life), and returned it to the common readership to whom the great poet really speaks.

This timeless cycle of short stories lays bare the life of a small town in the American Midwest. The central character is George Willard, a young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle to whom, one by one, the town's inhabitants confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. The town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson's special talent exposes the emotional undercurrents that bind its people together.

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Grim account by a former slave ship captain describes the apalling machinery of the commercial slave trade, including the harems and "factories" maintained by slavers, treatment and discipline of black Africans on slave ships, the suppression of slave revolts at sea, and much more. Republication of the classic 1854 edition.

Grim account by a former slave ship captain describes the apalling machinery of the commercial slave trade, including the harems and "factories" maintained by slavers, treatment and discipline of black Africans on slave ships, the suppression of slave revolts at sea, and much more. Republication of the classic 1854 edition.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and their Lost Generation confrères are memorably brought to life in Cowley’s classic memoir.

In prose of biblical grandeur and feverish intensity, William Faulkner reconstructed the history of the American South as a tragic legend of courage and cruelty, gallantry and greed, futile nobility and obscene crimes. No single volume better conveys the scope of Faulkner’s vision than The Portable Faulkner.