A literature of black women's courage and experience is at the heart of Maya Angelou's writing. She has been called a national institution and the people's poet. It has been suggested that she has manifested an indomitable spirit and benign will in her most famous book, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings". Enhanced by a chronology, bibliography, notes on the contributors, and an introductory essay by noted literary scholar Harold Bloom.

"In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences--the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling...

"This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, a young girl from Camden, Maine, who used her pen as a key to open doors to the wider world. Raised in a female, theatrics-loving household, the sensitive child harbored a talent for words, music, and drama and an inexorable desire to be loved. When Edna St. Vincent Millay was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over." "She was widely considered...

"Tells the life of Amelie Rives, a talented, privileged young woman who was one of the most famous women in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. This account of Rives's substantial literary career and her personal saga provides insights into the limits imposed on and actions taken by ambitious, elite young women in the late nineteenth-century South. Censer contextualizes Rives's writings and actions within an American society and...

The true story behind the iconic fictional detective is “a fascinating chapter in the history of publishing” (The Seattle Times).
 
An Edgar Award Winner for Best Biography and a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
 
The plucky “titian-haired” sleuth solved her first mystery in 1930—and eighty million books later, Nancy Drew has survived the Depression, World War II, and...