First published in 1943, The Little Locksmith was hailed as a major literary event: a rare and beautifully crafted memoir, holding an unforgettable story. The New York Times wrote, "It is the kind of book that cannot come into being without great living and great suffering and a rare spirit behind it."

Perhaps the most powerful and influential black American of his time, Frederick Douglass, embodied the tumultuous social changes that transformed the United States during the nineteenth century. In a career of unprecedented breadth, Douglass rose from the oppression of his slave's birth to fame as an abolitionist.

An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and beautiful style. Joan Didion was a writer's writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life's telling details. Her insights continue to influence...

In this uproarious exploration of the joys of reading, a long-time teacher, lifelong reader and The New Yorker contributor shares surprising stories from her life and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students and shows us how literature can transform us for the better.

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...

"Updike is Adam Begley's masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike--a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America,...

The first authorized biography of great American novelist, Jack London. He was born a working class, fatherless Californian in 1876. In his youth, he was a boundlessly energetic adventurer on the bustling West Coast, an oyster pirate, a hobo, a sailor, and a prospector by turns. He spent his brief life rapidly accumulating the experiences that would inform his acclaimed bestselling books: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf. The bare...

In February of his forty-fourth year, journalist David McCumber signed on as a hand on rancher Bill Galt's expansive Birch Creek spread in Montana. The Cowboy Way is an enthralling and intensely personal account of his year spent in open country-a book that expertly weaves together past and present into a vibrant and colorful tapestry of a vanishing way of life. At once a celebration of a breathtaking land both dangerous and nourishing, and a clear-eyed...

A poignant history of the cartoonists and illustrators from the Connecticut School For a period of about fifty years, right in the middle of the American Century, many of the nation's top comic-strip cartoonists, gag cartoonists, and magazine illustrators lived within a stone's throw of one another in the southwestern corner of Connecticut-a bit of bohemia in the middle of those men in their gray flannel suits. Cullen Murphy's father, John Cullen...

A Personal Record is writer Joseph Conrad's autobiography. The writing is lyrical and atmospheric and commonly believed to be somewhat embellished. It does, however, give great insight into his Polish childhood, his sailing adventures and his aspirations in the eyes of the British public. It also documents the process of writing Almayer's Folly. The preface to the work contains the much-quoted lines:

"Those who read me know my conviction

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