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 Also included are five previously unpublished short stories, most reflecting the influence on Heller of urban naturalist writers such as Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren.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helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss.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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Understanding Rita Dove serves as a critical introduction to the poetry of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who was also the first African American poet laureate of the United States. Through close readings of seven poetry collections, Pat Righelato offers detailed analyses of Rita Dove's thematic concerns and artistic development while bringing to light the musical sense of form and expression of history that permeates Dove's work. While underscoring each collection's distinctive identity, Righelato explores the continuities that link volume to volume, from the earliest chapbooks to Dove's most recent collection, ""American Smooth"". Charting Dove's evolution as a poet, Righelato begins with ""The Yellow House on the Corner"" to identify motifs of the mythical, historical, familial, and autobiographical that have become the writer's artistic capital. Dove brings African American experience to the mainstream of American poetry in ""Thomas and Beulah"" and ""On the Bus with Rosa Parks"". Righelato positions Dove as a successor to Robert Lowell in that her preoccupation with family history is exemplary of American culture. Righelato also argues for viewing Dove as markedly international. In particular Righelato illuminates Dove's affinity with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a feminist reading of ""Mother Love"", a volume written in respectful engagement with his Sonnets to Orpheus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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).

This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history.

Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature and time periods.

For a listing of Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes sorted by genre click here.

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 award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history. Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature and time periods. For a listing of Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes sorted by genre click here. 01

This text systematically presents career biographies of Russian writers of poetry and drama in the early 19th century.