A self-styled "American vandal" who pursued literary celebrity with "a mercenary eye" even as genteel America proclaimed him the American Rabelais, Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain, straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age. In "Littery Man", Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an "autobiography of authorship", a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when the American Writer emerged as a profession. Drawing on a wide range of cultural genres - popular boys' fiction, childrearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period - Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the "literary" into a powerful social category of representation. He shows how, as one of our culture's first modern celebrities, Samuel Clemens transformed his life into the artful performance we have come to know as Mark Twain, and his texts into a searching critique of modern identity in a mass-mediated society. "Littery Man" will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.

Extensively researched, painstakingly documented, and dedicated to the courageous men and women who fought and served in the First War with Iraq, this is a factual military history of Operation Desert Storm-and the only readable and thorough chronicle of the entire war. From the first night of battle to Day Two, when Saddam struck back, to G Day and the eventual cease-fire, accomplished military historian Richard S. Lowry delivers a detailed, day-by-day account of each battle and every military encounter leading up to the liberation of Kuwait. Desert Storm was a war of many firsts: America's first four-dimensional war; the first time in military history that a submerged submarine attacked a land target; the Marine Corps' first combat air strikes from an amphibious assault ship; the first time in the history of warfare that a soldier surrendered to a robot; and more. And it was an overwhelming victory for the United States and its allies. Intentionally presented without political commentary and ending with a complete listing of the heroic Americans killed in Desert Storm as well as a battle timeline, glossary, bibliography, and resources, "The Gulf War Chronicles" provides a much-needed understanding of the nature of modern-day, high-tech warfare and honors America's collective resolve and commitment to freedom.