Product Description: Quickies is a collection of flash fiction by David S Reynolds Futurecaster I'm Sorry Spirit's Last Vision The Eternal Question The Second Coming The Interview

Product Description: After being down and out with a family to support, Stephen Gordon luckily manages to land a job that ends the bad days forever. Stephen eventually learns that perhaps luck had nothing to do with getting the job and that it comes with a very high price that he may not want to pay...read more

Product Description: The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance...read more

The years from 1815 to 1848 were arguably the richest period in American life. In Waking Giant, award-winning historian David S. Reynolds illuminates the era's exciting political story alongside the fascinating social and cultural movements that influenced it. He casts fresh light on Andrew Jackson, who redefined the presidency, as well as John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk, who expanded the nation's territory and strengthened its position internationally. Waking Giant captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the slavery controversy, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization. Reynolds reveals unknown dimensions of the Second Great Awakening with its sects, cults, and self-styled prophets. He brings alive the reformers, abolitionists, and prohibitionists who struggled to correct America's worst social ills. He uncovers the political roots of some of America's greatest authors and artists, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe to Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, and he re-creates the shocking phenomena that marked the age: bloody duels and violent mobs; Barnum's freaks and all-seeing mesmerists; polygamous prophets and wealthy prostitutes; table-lifting spiritualists and rabble-rousing feminists. All were crucial to the political and social ferment that led to the Civil War. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Waking Giant is a brilliant chronicle of America's vibrant and tumultuous rise.

Product Description: The years from 1815 to 1848 were arguably the richest period in American life. In Waking Giant, award-winning historian David S. Reynolds illuminates the era's exciting political story alongside the fascinating social and cultural movements that influenced it...read more

A new biography by the award-winning author of Walt Whitman's America captures the turbulent life of John Brown, shedding new light on the controversial abolitionist who was responsible for the massacre of unarmed citizens in Kansas, liberation of slaves in Missouri, and raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in his anti-slavery campaign. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Product Description: From the great events of the day to the patient workings of a spider, few poets responded to the life around them as powerfully as Walt Whitman. Now, in this brief but bountiful volume, David S. Reynolds offers a wealth of insight into the life and work of Whitman, examining the author through the lens of nineteenth-century America...read more

Product Description: This book reprints for the first time since the 1850s three short works by George Thompson (1823--c. 1873), one of antebellum America's most successful and prolific authors of sensational fiction. Beginning in the 1840s, he wrote stories for sporting papers like Life in Boston and New York, edited the humorous New York weekly The Broadway Belle, and contributed regularly to the sexually explicit Venus' Miscellany...read more

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Product Description: An exploration of America's battle with the bottle through an analysis of literature on temperance. The ten essays in this book include topics ranging from the cultural role of the tavern in the 18th century, to the emergence of the disease paradigm of alcoholism in the 20th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A study of the life and works of one of America's finest poets is set against the social, cultural, and political backdrop of his time, offering new insights into his poetry, ideas, and imagery

Product Description: The fiery Philadelphia novelist and social reformer George Lippard was a respected friend of Poe, the founder of a nationwide labor organization, and a prolific author whose lurid exposé The Monks of Monk Hall (l845) was the most popular novel written by an American before the appearance of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin...read more