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Memoir, Biography, & Autobiography
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Paternalism's DaughterA celebrated historian and women’s studies scholar, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese roiled both disciplines with her transition from Marxist-inclined feminist to conservative public intellectual. In the first major biography of this singular and controversial scholar, Deborah Symonds explores Fox-Genovese’s... More
In the Arena
A Memoir of Love, War, and PoliticsIn December 1967, Chuck Robb was catapulted onto the national scene when he married Lynda Bird Johnson, the daughter of President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a nationally broadcast White House wedding. Shortly thereafter, Robb, a U.S. Marine, deployed to Vietnam, where he commanded India Company of the... More
Wandering Memory
The daughter of Haitian journalist and pro-democracy activist Jean Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000, Jan J. Dominique offers a memoir that provides a uniquely personal perspective on the tumultuous end of the twentieth century in Haiti. Wandering Memory is her elegy for a father and... More
The Life of William Faulkner
This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The... More
Three Rings
A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and FateIn this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories... More
1930
The First Automobile Trip in North America, from Manhattan to ManaguaImagine setting out on a road trip in a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, with the stated goal of traveling from Manhattan to Mexico and Central America, after only a week’s worth of preparation. This is exactly what brothers Arthur Lyon and Joe Lyon Jr. did on March 23, 1930. The Lyons acquired some... More
Reading through the Night
Jane Tompkins, a renowned literature professor and award-winning author, thought she knew what reading was until, struck by a debilitating illness, she finds herself reading day and night because it is all she can do. A lifelong lover of books, she realizes for the first time that if you pay close... More
Resurrections
Authors, Heroes—and a SpyJeffrey Meyers’ Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he... More
Paper Gardens
A Stroll through French LiteratureFrom Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Marcel Proust, from Marguerite Duras to George Sand, from Colette to Patrick Modiano, gardens appear in novels as representations of the real world, but also as reflections of the imagination. In Paper Gardens: A Stroll through French Literature, Évelyne Bloch-Dano... More
Mathilde Blind
Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of LettersWith Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841–1896), a freethinking radical feminist. Born to politically radical parents, Blind had, by the time she was thirty,... More
You Come Too
My Journey with Robert FrostRobert Frost observed in his wife, Elinor, a desire to live "a life that goes rather poetically." The same could be said of many members of the Frost family, over several generations. In You Come Too, Frost’s granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis, combines priceless personal memories and rigorous... More
Living on Wilderness Time
Melissa Walker set out on a journey that many women of her generation have mapped only in their dreams. Like many American chroniclers before her who have surrendered to the aimless pleasures of the road, Walker had no geographical destination in mind, but she did have two definite goals—one... More
Outside the Wire
American Soldiers' Voices from AfghanistanA riveting collection of thirty-eight narratives by American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, Outside the Wire offers a powerful evocation of everyday life in a war zone. Christine Dumaine Leche—a writing instructor who left her home and family to teach at Bagram Air Base and a forward operating... More
Steinbeck in Vietnam
Dispatches from the WarAlthough his career continued for almost three decades after the 1939 publication of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck is still most closely associated with his Depression-era works of social struggle. But from Pearl Harbor on, he often wrote passionate accounts of America’s wars based on his own... More
Escaping God's Closet
The Revelations of a Queer PriestHe survived a turbulent childhood in war-torn London, earned degrees with honors from Cambridge University, was ordained in the Church of England, became an Anglican worker-priest, and emigrated to the United States.He has been a prolific broadcaster for the BBC, helped organize the Public... More
Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years
A Critical EditionAfter a childhood divided between America and Europe, Henry James settled with his family in New England, first in what he regarded as an outpost of Europe, Newport, and later in Cambridge. The family letters (the initial inspiration for this autobiographical enterprise), many of which recount the... More
A Small Boy and Others
A Critical EditionHenry James was the final survivor of a remarkable family, and his memoir, written at the end of a long and tireless career, was prompted initially by the death of his "ideal Elder Brother," the psychologist and philosopher William James. A Small Boy and Others recounts the novelist’s earliest... More
Nature Cure
Early in Nature Cure Richard Mabey returns continually to the swift, who in its spectacular migration may not touch down for well over a year. In Ted Hughes’s phrase, the reappearance of the swifts tells us that "the globe’s still working." When we encounter the author in the opening pages of this... More
Gods of Noonday
A White Girl's African LifeThe daughter of medical missionaries, Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, in the midst of the national movement that would lead to independence from Great Britain. But as she tells it in her captivating new memoir, Orr did not grow up as a stranger abroad; she was a girl at home—only half... More
Perfect Companionship
Ellen Glasgow's Selected Correspondence with WomenThe novels of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ellen Glasgow ushered the South into the modern era, rejecting the typically romanticized approach for a cunningly observed realism. Glasgow’s originality of mind and abiding fascination with her native South are in abundant display in this new selection... More
The Letters of Christina Rossetti
1887-1894Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets--not just one of the major women poets—of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti’s work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites,... More
The Correspondence of William James
April 1908-August 1910This twelfth and final volume of The Correspondence of William James concludes the series of William James’s correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that began with volume 4. The first three volumes were devoted to the letters exchanged between the brothers William and Henry James.... More
Beloved Boy
Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915Already the subject of articles in the International Herald Tribune and the London Times, Beloved Boy is a remarkable collection of letters tracing Henry James’s fascination with and enduring devotion to a young Norwegian-American artist. James was already fifty-six when, visiting Rome in 1899, he... More