In this splendid group portrait, David Laskin tells the stories of four friendships that helped to define the course of American literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Written with uncommon grace and insight, A Common Life is a fascinating narrative of the entanglements of art and life, and an illuminating study of the nature of...

The author recounts in graphic novel format his troubled childhood with a radiologist father who subjected him to repeated x-rays and a withholding and tormented mother, an environment he fled at the age of sixteen in the hopes of becoming an artist.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald was a man of many aspects, a writer whose complexity and multitudes this composite biography finally aptly portrays. Bringing together twenty-three leading writers and scholars on Fitzgerald, each focusing on two years of his life, this volume presents a new way of grouping together biographical material and perspectives, considering from various angles the author's best-known works as well as understudied writings, personal experiences,...

This is a deeply moving portrait of Maurice Sendak, a seminal talent who is conflicted with his success, and whose lifelong obsession with death has subtly and ironically influenced his work. Now 81, Sendak is best known for his first book, Where the wild things are, which he wrote after spending ten years as an illustrator. Through his own words, firsthand photos, and illustrations, Sendak offers a rare, intimate, and unexpected look at his exceptional...

"Writer Pat Conroy passed away in 2016 at age 70. He was the author of The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, and Beach Music, among other works. Several of his books have been made into movies starring actors including Robert Duvall, Barbra Streisand, and Jon Voight. This book collects in one volume seventy entries from people who all knew a different facet of Pat Conroy: writers, poets, editors, musicians, friends, classmates....

Author Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological work challenges assumptions about race, gender and cultural superiority that had been defined by the field in the 19th century. She gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, but Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas. She would make several trips to the American South and the Caribbean, documenting the lives of rural Black people and collecting their...

"Harriet the Spy, first published in 1964, has mesmerized generations of readers and launched a million diarists. Its beloved antiheroine, Harriet, is erratic, unsentimental, and endearing--very much like the woman who created her, Louise Fitzhugh. Born in 1928, Fitzhugh was raised in segregated Memphis, but she soon escaped her cloistered world and headed for New York, where her expanded milieu stretched from the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village...

"Introduce your little one to the powerful writer and speaker. Told in simple sentences, this young reader edition of the best-selling series is perfect to read aloud to little dreamers."--Page 4 of cover