"In this candid and bluntly humorous collection of essays on a wide range of topics, Lurie begins with a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. She moves on to her unheralded, clumsy attempts and near failure to be a writer and, finally having reached a level of recognition,...

"The memoirs of Mary Rodgers--writer, composer, Broadway royalty, and "a woman who tried everything.""-- The daughter of one composer and the mother of another, Mary Rodgers was herself a composer, whose musical Once Upon a Mattress remains one of the rare revivable Broadway hits written by a woman. Here she tells how she became not just a theater figure in her own right but also a renowned author of books for young readers (including the classic...

"Who are the people who make our hearts race and our minds spin? Why are they so good at making us fear what goes bump in the night? What are the stories behind the writers who give us goosebumps? Dark Hearts is a collection of fourteen short biographies of the world's best-known horror writers, including Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Neil Gaiman, R. L. Stine, Stephen King, Bram Stoker, and others." --

"A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr."--

Traces the events of Sandburg's life that are relevant tohis writings and interprets and appraises his work.

"Who was the real Atticus Finch? The publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 forever changed how we think about Atticus Finch. Once seen as a paragon of decency, he was reduced to a small-town racist. How are we to understand this transformation? In Atticus Finch, historian Joseph Crespino draws on exclusive sources to reveal how Harper Lee's father provided the central inspiration for each of her books. A lawyer and newspaperman, A.C. Lee was a...

Presents descriptions and illustrations of over 150 historical landmarks associated with well-known American writers and poets, discussing the influence these sites had on their development as artists and on the creation of their works. --Publisher's description.

"Combine the wild waters of the Mississippi River and wordsmith Mark Twain, and what have you got? Some of the most famous and familiar literary works in American history, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Gilded Age, and Life on the Mississippi. Twain spent the first half of his life on and around the river, from his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, to his years as a steamboat pilot, during which he...