Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women's college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell's classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging a new standard for campus satire--and instantly yielding comparisons to Dorothy Parker's razor-sharp barbs. Like his fictional nemesis, Jarrell cuts through the earnest conversations at Benton College--mischievously, but with mischief nowhere more wicked than when crusading against the vitriolic heroine herself.

"A most literate account of a group of most literate people by a writer of power. . . . A delight of true understanding."--Wallace Stevens

"I'm greatly impressed by the real fun, the incisive satire, the closeness of observation, and in the end by a kind of sympathy and human warmth. It's a remarkable book."--Robert Penn Warren

"Move over Dorothy Parker. "Pictures ." . . is less a novel than a series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. Read it less for plot than sharp satire, Jarrell's forte."--Mary Welp

"One of the wittiest books of modern times."--"New York Times"

" T]he father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that 'political correctness' was so deliciously dissected 50 years ago."--Noel Malcolm, "Sunday Telegraph"

"A sustained exhibition of wit in the great tradition. . . . Immensely and very devastatingly shrewd."--Edmund Fuller, "Saturday Review"

" A] work of fiction, and a dizzying and brilliant work of social and literary criticism. Not only 'a unique and serious joke-book, ' as Lowell called it, but also a meditation made up of epigrams."--Michael Wood

Poet, novelist, literary critic, and teacher, Randall Jarrell was a writer with many facets, but most of all, he was a poet with a unique voice, one that was by turns imaginative, realistic, sensitive, and ironic. From the narratives of army life during the Second World War to the domestic scenes he wrote about so movingly in his final book, "The Lost World," Jarrell's poems are marked throughout by a voice that could be astonishingly intimate or could open up to speak to our common humanity. This collection, prepared by William H. Pritchard, presents some of Jarrell's finest poems to a new generation of readers.

In this expanded edition of Randall Jarrell's letters, his widow, Mary, has added letters from Jarrell to Peter Taylor, publication of which was withheld during Taylor's lifetime. Taylor was, along with Robert Lowell, Jarrell's oldest and closest friend, and the inclusion of these incomparable letters adds another dimension of friendship, artistry, and intellect to a collection already noted for its behind-the-scenes glimpse of twentieth-century American literary history in the making.

With an Introduction by Randall Jarrell. Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak despair, knowing the bitter reality that lies just below his mad visions. A chilling novel of family life, the relations between parents and children, husbands and wives, The Man Who Loved Children, is acknowledged as a contemporary classic.