Product Description: Born a slave and kept functionally illiterate until he escaped at age nineteen, William Wells Brown (1814–1884) refashioned himself first as an agent of the Underground Railroad, then as an antislavery activist and self-taught orator, and finally as the author of a series of landmark works that made him, like Frederick Douglass, a foundational figure of African American literature...read more

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture--a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionizing the professions of printer, publisher, bookseller, and author, he examines the connection between the bookmaking culture of mid-century and Leaves of Grass, and between the conditions for authorship and Whitman's career. The result is a far-ranging study of Whitman as a model of the nineteenth-century American writer writing for--and sometimes reacting against--the newly enfranchised, expanded reading public of his time.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was kept functionally illiterate until after his escape at the age of nineteen. Remarkably, he became the most widely published and versatile African American writer of the nineteenth century as well as an important leader in the abolitionist and temperance movements.Brown wrote extensively as a journalist but was also a pioneer in other literary genres. His many groundbreaking works include Clotel, the first African American novel; The Escape: or, A Leap for Freedom, the first published African American play; Three Years in Europe, the first African American European travelogue; and The Negro in the American Rebellion, the first history of African American military service in the Civil War. Brown also wrote one of the most important fugitive slave narratives and a striking array of subsequent self-narratives so inventively shifting in content, form, and textual presentation as to place him second only to Frederick Douglass among nineteenth-century African American autobiographers.Ezra Greenspan has selected the best of Brown's work in a range of fields including fiction, drama, history, politics, autobiography, and travel. The volume opens with an introductory essay that places Brown and his work in a cultural and political context. Each chapter begins with a detailed introductory headnote, and the contents are closely annotated; there is also a selected bibliography. This reader offers an introduction to the work of a major African American writer who was engaged in many of the important debates of his time.

Product Description: Book History is the annual journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc. (SHARP). Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and the reception of script and print...read more

Product Description: George Palmer Putnam (1814–1872) was arguably the most important American publisher of the nineteenth century, a man fully and multiply involved in developments transforming all aspects of literary culture. In this comprehensive cultural biography, Ezra Greenspan offers a wide-ranging account of a rich, productive life lived in print, interrelating Putnam’s life with the life of his family (one of the most remarkable of its time), with the changing patterns of life in New York City and the nation, and with the institutionalization of modern print culture in nineteenth-century America...read more

Product Description: Book History is the annual journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc. (SHARP).Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and the reception of script and print...read more

Product Description: Since 1855, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has been enjoyed, debated, parodied and imitated by readers, critics and artists crossing national and linguistic boundaries. Many argue that it is the most influential poem ever written by an American...read more

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A Secret Worth a Kingdom She was tall and lovely, crowned with a flaming mane of red hair, but Lady Marian's delicate beauty belied her powerful strength. When Elizabeth, her beloved queen and dearest friend since childhood, confided in her, Marian vowed she would do whatever she must to protect the sovereign's secret. To Griffith ap Powel, the battle-scarred Welshman sent by the king to watch over Lady Marian, such boldness in a woman was not comely. Yet as her defiant deeds and words made his blood boil with fury, her wild beauty drew him beyond any outrageous hope of escaping her. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Written for this volume by an international team of distinguished Whitman scholars, these essays address a wide range of contemporary issues in his life and art through varying approaches. The volume includes a chronology of Whitman's life and suggestions for further reading. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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