Product Description: Mark Twain, who was often photographed with a cigar, once remarked that he came into the world looking for a light. In this new biography, published on the centennial of the writer’s death, Jerome Loving focuses on Mark Twain, humorist and quipster, and sheds new light on the wit, pathos, and tragedy of the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...read more

In Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story Professor Jerome Loving provides an intuitive and 'interiorized' reading of the poet's most important works. Using biographical matters as a frame for his interpretations, Loving demonstrates how Dickinson's life is bound up with any series reading of her work. Literally, Dickinson wrote on the second storey of her father's house, but Loving argues that she also used that 'story' (or art) as both a retreat from the transitory nature of life and as a way of experiencing life in what might be termed the 'subjunctive' instead of the 'imperative'. Her persona, therefore, is as disembodied in the poems as was the reclusive poet to visitors to the Amherst 'Homestead'. Loving attempts to show that the voice we hear in the poems is that of the 'mind alone', as Dickinson herself said, 'without corporeal friend'. Of interest to students and scholars of American literature, this critical study will also interest more general readers who enjoy Dickinson's poetry.

Presents Whitman's classic collection celebrating himself and the American experience

In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th centuryOCOs canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society.From Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson to Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, James, Chopin, and Dreiser, Loving finds the American literary tradition filled with narrators who keep waking up to the central scene of the authorOCOs real or imagined life. They travel through a customhouse of the imagination in which the Old World experience of the present is taxed by the New World of the utopian past, where life is always cyclical instead of linear and ameliorative.Loving celebrates, enjoys, and experiences these awakened and reborn writers as he challenges the notion that American literature is preponderately OC cultural work.OCO In the epilogue, he packs up his own carpetbagOCothe American egoOCoand passes through the European customhouse to find that American writers are more readily perceived as literary geniuses outside their culture than within it."

A masterful critical biography of the author of Sister Carrie interweaves Dreiser's literary accomplishments into the context of his life, detailing his turbulent personal life, membership in the communist party, numerous sexual liaisons, and literary work and its lasting influence on the course of twentieth-century American literature.

A biography of the American poet discusses topic such as his relationship with his family, his many jobs, his attitudes towards race, and his developing notions of male-male love