Years before the publication of "Catch-22" ("A monumental artifact of contemporary literature" -- "The New York Times;" "An apocalyptic masterpiece" -- "Chicago Sun-Times;" "One of the most bitterly funny works in the language" -- "The New Republic"), Joseph Heller began sharpening his skills as a writer, searching for the voice that would best express his own peculiarly wry view of the world.
In "Catch As Catch Can, " editors Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker have for the first time collected the short stories Heller published prior to that first novel, along with all the other short pieces of fiction and nonfiction that were published during his lifetime. Also included are five previously unpublished short stories, most reflecting the influence on Heller of urban naturalist writers such as Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren.
The result is an important and significant addition to our understanding and appreciation of Joseph Heller, showing his evolution as a writer and artist. For those unfamiliar with his work, it will serve as an excellent introduction; for everyone else, "Catch As Catch Can" is a chance to explore a new aspect of Heller's remarkable career.

Four essays trace the revival of the popularity of this American classic; analyze it in the context of the perennial quest for the "great American novel" and examine the central themes of love, money, order and illusion in the novel. A final essay focuses on its unique style.

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald himself wrote it. From its first edition onward, the text has been subject to rigorous house-styling that has distorted the characteristic rhythms and structure of his sentences. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages, to provide the first authoritative text of The Great Gatsby. This volume also includes a detailed account of the genesis, composition, and publication of the novel; a full textual apparatus; crucial early draft material; helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss. Fitzgerald's great masterpiece is thus brought closer to a cross-section of readers, more accessibly and more authentically than ever before.

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald intended. The first edition was marred by errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive rewriting in proof and the conditions under which the book was produced; moreover, the subsequent transmission of the text introduced proliferating departures from the author's words. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages, to provide the first authoritative text of The Great Gatsby. This volume also includes a detailed account of the genesis, composition, and publication of the novel; a full textual apparatus; crucial early draft material; helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss. Fitzgerald's masterpiece is thus brought closer to a cross-section of readers, more accessibly and more authentically than ever before. Matthew J. Bruccoli has published widely. He is the author of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980) and editor of New Essays on The Great Gatsby (CUP, 1985).

Even in its incomplete form The Love of The Last Tycoon has achieved a reputation as the best novel about Hollywood. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had written seventeen of thirty projected episodes. In 1941 the 'unfinished novel' was published in a text for general readers by Edmund Wilson under the title The Last Tycoon. For more than fifty years this edition, which is not true to the original work in progress, has been the only one available. This critical edition of The Love of The Last Tycoon, first published in 1994, utilises Fitzgerald's manuscript drafts, revised typescipts, and working notes to establish the first authoritative text of the work. The volume includes a detailed history of the gestation, composition, and publication of the novel; full textual apparatus with editorial notes; fascimiles of the drafts; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references for contemporary readers. The reconstruction of Fitzgerald's plan for the thirteen unwritten episodes is particularly useful. F. Scott Fitzgerald's incomplete masterpiece is restored its 1940 state, and thus made fully accessible to a cross-section of readers.

The standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This pictorial autobiography of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald documents two lives that have become legendary. The book draws almost entirely from the scrapbooks and photograph albums that the Fitzgeralds scrupulously kept as their personal record and provides a wealth of illustrative material not previously available. The book offers: Fitzgerald's thoughts about his early loves in St Paul, Minnesota; a photograph of the country club in Montgomery, Alabama, where the two met; reviews of ""This Side of Paradise""; poems to the couple from Ring Lardner; snapshots of their trips abroad; Fitzgerald's careful accounting of his earnings; a photograph of the house on Long Island where ""The Great Gatsby"" was conceived; postcards with Fitzgerald's drawings for his daughter. These rare photographs and memorabilia combine into a narrative augmented by selections from Scott's and Zelda's own writings, conveying the spirit of particuular moments in their lives.

Tender is the Night, the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald worked longest and hardest on, has not achieved its proper recognition because the text is peppered with errors and chronological inconsistencies. Moreover, the novel has a concentration of references to people, places and events that most readers no longer recognize. In this guide to the novel, Matthew J. Bruccoli corrects those errors and explains the factual details. He also offers maps, photos, correspondence and notes that demystify the writing of one of literature's most misunderstood - and underrated - masterpieces.

Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928a1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films based on his work, including Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall (based on aWe Can Remember It for You Wholesalea), Minority Report (based on aThe Minority Reporta), and Next (based on aThe Golden Mana). In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction.

Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dickas own tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link addresses Dickas efforts to break into the mainstream in the 1950s, his return to science fiction in the 1960s, and his move toward more theologically oriented work in his final two decades. Link finds across Dickas writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the very nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dickas genre-defining tales.

This is a telling assessment of the divergent works of a daring British writer. ""Understanding Julian Barnes"" surveys the career of an innovative British novelist who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on three occasions. In this analysis of Barnes' distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes' greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way. In evaluating Barnes' fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue surrounding his divided career as a writer of serious novels, published under his own name, and of detective thrillers, published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

This is a critical companion to Vonnegut's early novels. ""Understanding Kurt Vonnegut"" is a critical analysis of Vonnegut's fiction as a point of entrance for students and general readers alike. In close readings of Vonnegut's novels, William Rodney Allen examines the distinctive stylistic, thematic, and formally innovative elements that earned Vonnegut (1922-2007) a mass following, especially among young readers, as well as critical respect among scholars.

To add a significant phrase to our language is no easy feat, but that is precisely what Joseph Heller (1923a1999) did with acatch-22,a the principle of absurdist logic and bureaucratic foul-up that energized his debut novel, Catch-22, in 1961. In this revised edition of Understanding Joseph Heller, Sanford Pinsker explores the idiosyncratic vision that permeates Helleras complete body of work, as he maps the dark terrain Heller carved out, novel by novel, with considerable verbal dazzle and the uncompromising outrage of the classical satirist.

This updated edition includes new chapters on Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22; Now and Then, Helleras memoir of growing up in Brooklyn; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, his posthumously published novel; and Catch as Catch Can, a collection of assorted short stories and sketches.

This is the first book-length critical approach to the fiction of the award-winning author of ""Birds of America"". ""Understanding Lorrie Moore"" is a comprehensive companion to the works of this wickedly humorous writer, whose fiction shows a deep sensitivity to the dynamics of contemporary gender relations and an abiding interest in portraying and critiquing the American national character. The recipient of the 1998 O. Henry Award and the 2004 Rea Award for the Short Story, Lorrie Moore is best known for her short fiction. Alison Kelly shows that Moore's virtuosic prose, wry humor, and sense of irony are tools for registering how Americans face the discomfort of their daily lives as individuals and as a nation. Kelly traces Moore's emergence as a writer in the 1980s and her artistic development up to the present day, illuminating the distinctive narrative methods, aesthetics, and thematic preoccupations of Moore's major works. Kelly follows Moore's recurrent characters, situations, metaphors, and motifs in order to promote understanding of the texts and appreciation for their wordplay, wit, and imagery. Viewing her subject as a subtly political writer, Kelly discusses Moore's major themes, techniques, and stylistics as evidence that her characters' private pains are symptomatic of a wider national malaise.

Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown. With readings of a broad range of her published works, including her final novel, The Blue Flower, Wolfe describes the unfolding of Fitzgerald's writing as a subtle, ongoing process. He maintains that the novels, though plain and rambling at first glance, grow fuller, stranger, and more stirring the more we invest in them. He details Fitzgerald's skill at sequencing events so as to unsettle readers and her ability to enhance motifs by not leaning too hard on them. Wolfe suggests that Fitzgerald's refusal to overplay effects and emotions, while at first puzzling in its disdain for drama, turns out to be one of her chief virtues, for she enables larger associations to emerge as she keeps big dramatic scenes from interfering with wider patterns. While enumerating Fitzgerald's many talents, Wolfe ultimately attributes much of her success to her style. He concludes that her exceptionally disciplined prose, which gives voice to her candor and compassion, imbues her work with a sense of mood, place, and character.

An essential collection of baseball fiction by the master of the form More than any other writer in the twentieth century, Ring Lardner was identified with baseball. His years as a newspaper reporter in Chicago covering the Cubs and White Sox gave him inside knowledge of the sport and how it reflected the American experience. Lardner's baseball short stories remain the core of his career and the basis of his enduring reputation. With his unerring eye for detail and his sense of the absurd, Lardner ranged over the entire game. He probed not only the nature of the game but also the lives of the men who played it. His famous portraits, such as those in "Alibi Ike" and "My Roomy," express his complex responses to baseball and the people associated with it. Historically accurate and richly textured, Ring Around the Bases reveals the master at the height of his craft and celebrates the American pastime. The collection is the ultimate lineup in baseball fiction. Ring Around the Bases was originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1992 in cloth. This new paperback edition includes an additional uncollected short story. Located after the publication of the cloth edition, "The Courtship of T. Dorgan" truly makes this volume of thirty-four stories the complete Lardner baseball collection.

In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Maxwell Perkins about a young American expatriate in Paris, an unknown writer with a ""brilliant future"". When Perkins wrote to Ernest Hemingway several months later, he began a correspondence spanning more than two decades and charting the career of one of the most influential American authors of this century. The letters collected here are the record of that professional alliance and of Hemingway's development as a writer.

Working with the complete collection of "Tender is the Night" manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, Matthew J. Bruccoli reconstructs seventeen drafts and three versions of the novel to answer questions about F. Scott Fitzgerald's major work that have long puzzled critics of modern literature.

In 1934, nine years after the appearance of "The Great Gatsby, " Fitzgerald permitted publication of "Tender is the Night." Disappointed by its critical reception, Fitzgerald suggested that the structure of the novel should be drastically rearranged. In 1951, eleven years after his death, Charles Scribner's Sons brought out an edition that incorporated Fitzgerald's changes. Controversy arose over the merits of the two published versions and over the "nine lost years" in Fitzgerald's life between his two great novels, years of rewriting before publication of "Tender is the Night" that resulted in six cartons of notes and drafts. After analyzing this wealth of material, Bruccoli reconstructs every working stage in the novel and reaches his own conclusions about which edition is the most valid.

This is a collection of Wolfe's earliest publications from his college years.The ""Magical Campus"" collects for the first time Thomas Wolfe's earliest published works - including poems, plays, short fiction, news articles, speeches, and essays - both signed and unsigned, assembled in chronological order. The collegiate career of Wolfe began at UNC Chapel Hill in 1916, at the age of fifteen, with a freshman year marked by obscurity and loneliness. By his junior year, he had emerged as a recognized and popular figure in campus life, a central participant in numerous organizations and fraternities, and the editor of several student publications. Wolfe began in these apprenticeship years his ascendancy to iconic literary status.Included in ""The Magical Campus"" is Wolfe's first published work, the poem ""A Field in Flanders"" from the November 1917 issue of the University of North Carolina Magazine. Here too is the poem ""The Challenge,"" Wolfe's first piece to be subsequently reprinted off campus in his hometown newspaper. ""A Cullenden of Virginia"" marked his inaugural foray into the realm of published fiction and his folk plays, such as ""The Return of Buck Gavin"" and ""Deferred Payment,"" are illustrative of his unrealized ambitions to be a playwright. Though they lack the sophistication and scale of the grand fictions that now define Wolfe's place in literature, his student publications speak to the potential he had tapped into.

Understanding Jamaica Kincaid introduces readers to the prizewinning author best known for the novels ""Annie John"", ""Lucy"", and ""The Autobiography of My Mother"". Justin D. Edwards surveys Jamaica Kincaid's life, career, and major works of fiction and nonfiction to identify and discuss her recurring interests in familial relations, Caribbean culture, and the aftermath of colonialism and exploitation. In addition to examining the haunting prose, rich detail, and personal insight that have brought Kincaid widespread praise, Edwards also identifies and analyzes the novelist's primary thematic concerns - the flow of power and the injustices faced by people undergoing social, economic, and political change. Edwards chronicles Kincaid's childhood in ""Antigua"", her development as a writer, and her early journalistic work as published in the ""New Yorker"" and other magazines. In separate chapters he provides critical appraisals of Kincaid's early novels; her works of nonfiction, including ""My Brother"" and ""A Small Place""; and her more recent novels, including ""Mr. Potter"". Edwards discusses the way in which Kincaid both exposes the problems of colonization and neocolonization and warns her readers about the dire consequences of inequality in the era of globalization.

For the First Time, all the commercially published short stories F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote before and during his work on what would become his great American novel, The Great Gatsby, have been collected in one volume. Published between 1919 and 1923, these twenty-six stories -- most of which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and in two Fitzgerald volumes, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age -- document the striking development of Fitzgerald's professionalism and short-story craftsmanship during his twenties. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost expert on Fitzgerald, the annotated and generously illustrated collection reproduces magazine artwork, manuscripts, advertisements, and photographs that provide a rich contextual backdrop for understanding the ways American life shaped Fitzgerald's fiction.

John le Carre (b. 1931) is the pen name of David Cornwell. Under that pseudonym he has become the leading writer of contemporary spy thrillers. Tremendously popular and deeply influential, his novels feature a level of psychological depth and narrative complexity that makes them as rewarding as the most highly-touted literary fiction.

Weaving incisive political commentary, razor-sharp satire, and suspense, his work reflects upon and dissects both Cold War anxieties and the complications of social relationships. Several of his novels-including "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," "The Russia House," and "The Tailor of Panama"-have been adapted into award-winning movies.

In "Conversations with John le Carre," the acclaimed writer talks about his craft, the nature of language, the literature that he loves, and the ways in which his own life influences the creation of, and characters within, his novels. He worked for the British Foreign Office in the 1960s, and although his works are dazzlingly informed about global politics, le Carre's voice is distinctively British.

His love of language, particularly the ways in which it can reveal or conceal thought and action, is evident in every piece here. In interviews with George Plimpton, Melvyn Bragg, and others, le Carre proves himself to be quick witted, engaging, and deeply passionate. Though often self-deprecating in his humor, le Carre reveals his commitment to the spy thriller and tells us why he thinks it is just as capable of exploring human consciousness as any other literary genre.

Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on F. Scott Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur."

Judith S. Baughman works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina. With Bruccoli she is co-editor of "Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald" (University Press of Mississippi).

Literary Criticism -- Biography -->

"Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald" assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night,"

Although most of these are not standard interviews in the modern sense, the quotes from Fitzgerald and the contemporary journalistic reaction to him reveal much about his writing techniques, artistic wisdom, and life. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost Fitzgerald scholar, and Judith S. Baughman have collected the most usable and articulate pieces on Fitzgerald, including a three-part 1922 interview conducted for the "St. Paul Daily News,"

Fitzgerald (1896-1940) died before the authorial interview became a literary subgenre after World War II. Although Fitzgerald enjoyed his celebrity, as is clear in these pieces, he had a poor sense of public relations and provided interviewers with opportunities to trivialize him. As a result, Fitzgerald was often treated condescendingly in the press. Seven of his interviews-five printed before 1924-have flapper in their headlines. In the Jazz Age-a term Fitzgerald coined-he was regarded as a spokesman for rebellious youth, as a playboy, as an authority on sex and marriage, as an expert on Prohibition, and as an immensely popular writer for his work published in the "Saturday Evening Post," Yet his literary ambitions were sizable and his impact on American fiction immeasurable.

Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald,"

Judith S. Baughman, who works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, has written the F. Scott Fitzgerald volume in the Gale Study Guides series and has edited "American Decades: 1920-1929,"

Like other volumes in the series, this work discusses the lives and careers of individual authors and summarizes critical responses to their work, from initial publication to 1997. This volume features Italian novelists since World War II.

This text systematically presents career biographies of Medieval Japanese writers.