One of the greatest works of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage gazes fearlessly into the bright hell of war through the eyes of one young soldier, the reluctant Henry Fleming. Written by Stephen Crane at the age of twenty-one, the novel imagines the Civil War's terror and loss with an unblinking vision so modern and revolutionary that, upon publication, critics hailed it as a work of literary genius. Ernest Hemingway declared, "There was...

Why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcohism, an addiction that cost them personal happiness and caused harm to those who loved them?In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All...

"This book originates from a major group exhibition curated by Glenn LIgon, one of the most influential American artists of his generation. It features forty-five artists who he refers to in his art and in his writings, or who have been of significance to him more generally, including Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lorna Simpson, Steve McQueen and Zoe Leonard. Literature is a frequent stimulus for...

A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction....

"In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl" and Jack Kerouac' On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through this course, which he taught first at the Narope Institute in Colorado, and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present a full history of Beat literature and to record his own stories and memories, ones that might otherwise...

The Legacy of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) - as writer, teacher and conservationist - once moved Edward Abbey to declare him "the only living American worthy of the Nobel." Unequaled in the American literature of place, his Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction created an entirely new consciousness of the American West. As director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, Stegner wielded a powerful influence on many of the most important writers...

"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES. The shelf has everything Rose could...

A dramatization chronicling the bombing of Pearl Harbor from both the Japanese and American points of view.