Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth. So begins Sid Fleischman's ramble-scramble biography of the great American author and wit, who started life in a Missouri village as a barefoot boy named Samuel Clemens.

Abandoning a career as a young steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, Sam took a bumpy stagecoach to the far West. In the gold and silver fields, he expected to get rich quick. Instead, he got

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Louisa came from a family that was poor but freethinking, and she started teaching when she was only seventeen years old. But writing was her passion. This biography captures the life of a compassionate woman who left an indelible mark on literature for all ages.

Collection of short stories by the author of Daisy Miller and The turn of the screw.

The story of Emma Lazarus, who, despite her life of privilege, became a tireless advocate for the immigrants who arrived in New York City in the 1880s and wrote a famous poem for the Statue of Liberty.

Examines the life of the nineteenth-century author famous for the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which denounced slavery and intensified the disagreement between the North and South.

T. S. Eliot called Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro, "the better craftsman." James Joyce declared he was "a miracle of ebulliency, gusto and help." W.B. Yeats recalled that to "talk over a poem with him" was "like getting you to put a sentence into dialect. All becomes clear and natural." The supercharged Ezra Pound seemed to be everywhere at once in the literary world of the early twentieth century, cajoling, hectoring, provoking, and refashioning literature...

Explores the relationship between Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant and the influence each had on the other to complete their respective literary works--Grant's memoirs and Twain's novel on Huckleberry Finn.

Before Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great writer, he was a city boy who longed for the broad, open fields and deep, still woods of the country, and then a young man who treasured books, ideas, and people. When he grew up and set out in the world, he wondered, could he build a life around these things he loved? This biography illustrates the rewards of a life well-lived, one built around personal passions: creativity and community, nature and friendship....