Fifty years of literary criticism by the acclaimed critic covers the works of Hawthorne, Dreiser, Melville, Wharton, James, Stein, Plath, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, and Cheever, among many other American authors.

Collected recent essays by the acclaimed novelist-critic range over a broad spectrum, offering fresh and sharply focused appraisals of life and art

Compiles the best literary essays of the year originally published in American periodicals

Living with her brother and grandmother while her parents drift from place to place, Marian Coleman finally decides to move to New York by herself and begin a new life

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Product Description: A single novel, an eternal classic, established him as a founding father of American literature. Now, a century after his death, a new popular surge of interest in Herman Melville calls for Elizabeth Hardwick's rich analysis of "the whole of Melville's works, uneven as it is, and the challenging shape of his life ...read more

Product Description: Drawn from Melville’s own adolescent experience aboard a merchant ship, Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a bereft and damaged soul, who takes him on a tour of London that includes a scene of rococo decadence unlike anything else in Melville’s fiction...read more

Examines the roles of women in the works of the Brontes, Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Jane Carlyle, and others (view table of contents)

An acclaimed American essayist, whose first collection, Seduction and Betrayal, was nominated for the National Book Award, uses her sharp intellect and elegant prose style to consider America's greatest female authors. (view table of contents)

Joseph Parks and Anita Mitchell meet during a sensational murder trial and are drawn together as they try to understand the motivation of the murderer

Memories of Kentucky racetracks, jazz clubs in the 1940s, Billie Holliday's Harlem, Boston Hill, summers in Maine, winters in New York, and the played-out ends of lives give form to a work about the life of one woman and her recollections of friends and lovers, parents and children

Collects the author's writings on such figures as Caryl Chessman, Sherwood Anderson, Dylan Thomas, and Mary McCarthy