Americas category: 34066 books
February House
The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Brooklyn
Language: English
Release Date: July 26, 2016
An “irresistible” account of a little-known literary salon and creative commune in 1940s Brooklyn (The Washington Post Book World).
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
February House is the true story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young...
Papa Hemingway
A Personal Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2018
An intimate, joy-filled portrait and New York Times bestseller, written by one of Hemingway’s closest friends: “It is hard to imagine a better biography” (Life).
In 1948, A. E. Hotchner went to Cuba to ask Ernest Hemingway to write an article on “The Future of Literature” for Cosmopolitan...
Call Me Burroughs
A Life
Language: English
Release Date: January 28, 2014
Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs...
Zora Neale Hurston on Florida Food
Recipes, Remedies & Simple Pleasures
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2015
Eatonville, Florida native Zora Neale Hurston's early twentieth-century ethnographic research and writing emphasizes the essentials of food in Florida through simple dishes and recipes. It considers foods prepared for everyday meals as well as special occasions and looks at what shaped people's eating...
by Walt Whitman
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Though it is one of its author's lesser-known works, Specimen Days is perhaps the closest thing to an autobiography that Walt Whitman ever wrote. The book defies any notion of genre, and is a hodgepodge of accounts about Whitman's youth, his experiences in the American Civil War, and his musings on nature...
by Neil Steinberg
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2012
In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City." From garbage collection to the skyline, nothing escaped Liebling's withering gaze. Among the outraged responses from Chicago residents was one that Liebling described as the...
Now and Then
From Coney Island to Here
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2010
The demented Army Air Force of Catch-22, the lethal business world of Something Happened, the dysfunctional family of Good as Gold-all these, we have assumed, had their roots in Joseph Heller's own past. Now, more than thirty-five years after the explosion of Catch-22 into the world's consciousness,...
Walt Whitman's America
A Cultural Biography
Language: English
Release Date: May 4, 2011
Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and
Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award
In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his...
Witness to a Century
Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2011
"This extraordinary book . . . is a reminder . . . of the sins of suppression and untruth that have been and can be committed in the name of American journalism . . . One of the last first-person statements from a generation that included Hitler, Nehru, and Mao . . . and Seldes too." --Columbia Journalism Review
by H.L. Mencken
Language: English
Release Date: March 20, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: March 20, 2013
Though best known for his caustic newspaper columns, H. L. Mencken's most enduring contribution to American literature may be his autobiographical writings, most of which first appeared in the New Yorker. In Happy Days, Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s...
I Celebrate Myself
The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 2007
In the first biography of Ginsberg since his death in 1997 and the only one to cover the entire span of his life, Ginsberg's archivist Bill Morgan draws on his deep knowledge of Ginsberg's largely unpublished private journals to give readers an unparalleled and finely detailed portrait of one of America's...
The Life of Josiah Henson
An Inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom
Language: English
Release Date: December 14, 2015
Born into slavery on a Maryland farm, Josiah Henson (1789–1883) worked as a foreman, married, and became a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Faced with the prospect of separation from his family, Henson fled with his wife and children to Ontario, where he became a leader in the Afro-Canadian...
Hawthorne in Concord
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2007
A richly textured account of the writer’s three sojourns in New England “illuminates Hawthorne’s art and the intellectual ferment originating in that small, bucolic town” (Publishers Weekly).
On his wedding day in 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne escorted his new wife, Sophia, to their first home,...
Country Editor's Boy
A Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2014
A memoir of youthful years spent in Colorado as the American West was transformed, by the author of High, Wide, and Lonesome and The Dog Who Came to Stay.
Country Editor’s Boy picks up where Hal Borland’s classic memoir *High, Wide and Lonesome *left off: with Borland, on the cusp...