H.L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. In this volume and a companion, The Library of America presents all six series of Prejudices (1919-1927), the iconoclastic collections that helped blast American literature out of its complacency and into a new age of frankness and maturity. The fantastic linguistic inventiveness, full-bodied humor, and unwaveringly fierce courage of...

" ... Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, 'The Civil War: The First Year' brings together over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis ..."--Dust jacket flap.

"... includes the complete newspaper exchange between Novanglus (Adams) and Massachusettensis (loyalist Daniel Leonard), as well as extensive diary excerpts and characteristically frank personal letters"--v.1 book jacket. "Traces John Adams' career from his leading role in the debate over independence, [...] to his tireless efforts to establish the fledgling government of the United States and supply its army in the filed, to his crucial diplomatic...

A presentation of the best of Smith's inimitable columns...miniature masterpieces that set the gold standard for sportswriting. Includes Smith's indelible profiles of sports luminaries and unforgettable accounts of historic occasions, which show his gift for distilling a career's essence in a single column.

With the publication of her first book, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. "What is important now," she wrote, "is to recover our senses ... In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to...

Through his distinctive fusion of modernist daring and traditional storytelling, Bernard Malamud became one of postwar America's most important writers, his work an inspiration for and lasting influence on novelists who have come after him, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth most notably among them. The second volume of the Library of America's Malamud edition brings together three novels of the 1960s: A New Life (1961), a satiric campus novel set in the...

In this first volume of a lavishly produced two-volume collector's edition, The Library of America presents eight enduring masterpieces charting the evolution of the musical from the groundbreaking Show Boat through the genre's glorious mid-century. Based on new research, the complete libretto of each musical is presented in its Broadway opening night version, making these beloved cultural treasures available as never before. The texts are supplemented...

This anthology traces the surprising story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own through a wide range of genres. The writers included range from the 1800s to the present day, and offer testimony to Shakespeare's profound and enduring influence.

"All three [novels] were seen by Kerouac as forming part of The Duluoz Legend, a multivolume autobiographical saga recording the major events of the author's life"--Page 761.