In Ruth Hall, one of the bestselling novels of the 1850s, Fanny Fern drew heavily on her own experiences: the death of her first child and her beloved husband, a bitter estrangement from her family, and her struggle to make a living as a writer. Written as a series of short vignettes and snatches of overheard conversations, it is as unconventional in style as in substance and strikingly modern in its impact.

Covering the decades from the 1830s through the end of the century, as well as the eastern, southern, and western regions of the United States, these essays, by a diverse group of scholars, examine a variety of periodicals from the well-known Atlantic Monthly to small papers such as The National Era. They illustrate how literary analysis can be enriched by consideration of social history, publishing contexts, the literary marketplace, and the relationships between authors and editors.

Margaret Fuller-journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist-was a foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune from 1846-50. This engrossing book provides the first complete edition of Fuller's dispatches from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches but soon turned into moving and dramatic eyewitness accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. Fuller's letters are extraordinarily good. They will be of interest to scholars of American literature and history, women's studies, and European literature and history.-Joel Myerson, University of South Carolina This collection of thirty-seven dispatches written for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune presents an opportunity to view Fuller] as a developing personality, burning off heaps of silliness and taking on something like character-even splendor-as she finds herself caught up in the brief, calamitous life of the Roman Republic during the European uprisings of the late 1840s.-Thomas Mallon, New Criterion Recommended for the power of Fuller's own writing, for its capacity to convey the emotional idealism of liberal America as well as liberal Italy, not to mention the amusement she as well as her readers derive from observing the sight-seer 'abroad.'-Agatha Ramm, International History Review This welcome edition has made more accessible the works of an important figure in American literary history.-Sylvia Neely, Journal of the Early Republic

This comprehensive volume celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" with twenty essays by preeminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus exclusively on the original edition. Once regarded as primarily a collector's item, this edition is now viewed as the poet's most bold and compelling articulation of the possibilities of American democracy. The essays weave a rich tapestry of the most current, innovative criticism on this foundational book of American poetry. The contributors treat Whitman's poetry, his biography, his politics, his reception in the United States and abroad, race and ethnic issues, nineteenth-century America, and even the complex typographical history of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass." The volume also includes a tribute from the renowned poet Galway Kinnell.