Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
 
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town,...

A chronicle of a year in the late 1930s on the author's farm, Chimney Farm, in Nobleboro, Maine.

The author grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard", hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other side by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common law. This is the author's powerful...

Traces the birth of modern America as reflected by the writings of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Warrant Stoddard, and Ina Coolbrith, placing their achievements and personal lives against a backdrop of the post-Gold Rush era in California.

Born in New York City's black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city's new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade's opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully,...

"A literary travelogue that ventures deep into the heart of classic Southern literature. As the writer Elif Batuman did for Russian literature in The Possessed, Margaret Eby does for Southern literature in this charming book of literary exploration. From Mississippi (William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Barry Hannah) to Alabama (Harper Lee, Truman Capote) to Georgia (Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews) and beyond, Eby--herself a Southerner--travels...

"When young Samuel Clemens first visited the nation's capital in 1854, both were rough around the edges and of dubious potential. Returning as Mark Twain in 1867, he brought his sharp eye and acerbic pen to the task of covering the capital for nearly a half-dozen newspapers. He fit inperfectly among the other hard-drinking and irreverent correspondents. His bohemian sojourn in Washington, D.C., has been largely overlooked, but his time in the capital...