Product Description: Henry David Thoreau is an American intellectual icon; what made him so was the decade between his graduation from Harvard and the years he spent in a cabin he built himself on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land at Walden Pond--the formative decade that turned him into one of America's most influential writers...read more

Product Description: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography"Thoroughly absorbing, lively...Fuller, so misunderstood in life, richly deserves the nuanced, compassionate portrait Marshall paints." —Boston GlobePulitzer Prize finalist Megan Marshall recounts the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller: Thoreau’s first editor, Emerson’s close friend, daring war correspondent, tragic heroine...read more

Product Description: Beginning with Thoreau, nature writers not only have influenced our appreciation of the natural world but also have helped to preserve the American wilderness, from the Maine Woods to Yosemite and the Sierra. Writer and activist Paul Brooks presents narrative portraits of great literary naturalists, offering a 200-year history of the country's movement toward conservation...read more

Product Description: The youngest correspondent to cover the Civil War and a pioneer in newspaper syndication, George Alfred Townsend came from modest circumstances. Using the pen name of GATH, he rose to fame and fortune after the war, and his career brought him into contact with sitting presidents and luminaries such as Mark Twain...read more

Since its release nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women has been a mainstay in American literature, while passionate Jo March and her calm, beloved "Marmee" have shaped generations of young women. Biographers have consistently credited her father, Bronson Alcott, for Louisa's professional success, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.But in this riveting dual biography, Eve LaPlante explodes those myths, drawing on unknown and unexplored letters and journals to show that Louisa's "Marmee," Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world. It was Abigail who urged Louisa to write, who inspired many of her stories, and who gave her the support and courage she needed to pursue her unconventional path. Abigail, long dismissed as a quiet, self-effacing companion to her famous husband and daughter, is revealed here as a politically active feminist firebrand, a fascinating thinker in her own right. Examining family papers, archival documents, and diaries thought to have been destroyed, LaPlante paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of a woman decades ahead of her time-and the fiercely independent daughter who was both inspired and restricted by her mother's dreams of freedom.A story guaranteed to turn all previous scholarship on its head, Marmee and Louisa is a gorgeously written and deeply felt biography of two extraordinary women as well as a key to our understanding of Louisa May Alcott's life and work.

Product Description: *Confederate Bushwhacker is a microbiography set in the most important and pivotal year in the life of its subject. In 1885, Mark Twain was at the peak of his career as an author and a businessman. Twenty years after the end of the Civil War, Twain finally tells the story of his past as a deserter from the losing side, while simultaneously befriending and publishing the general from the winning side...read more

Product Description: Filled with the remarkable wit and humor of America's favorite storyteller, A Mark Twain Christmas gives readers insight into Twain's life through little known stories about how he and his family celebrated this treasured holiday...read more

Product Description: A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881)...read more

Product Description: The Art of Public Speaking personalizes learning for every student no matter who they are or where they are, ensuring that they come to your public speaking class confident, prepared with the principle foundations, and ready to participate in your teaching and coaching...read more

Product Description: In August 1869, a thirty-three-year-old journalist named Samuel Clemens - or as he was later known, Mark Twain - moved to Buffalo, New York. At the time, he had high hopes of establishing himself as a successful newspaper editor of the Buffalo Morning Express in the thriving, up-and-coming metropolis at the end of the Erie Canal...read more

Product Description: In his heyday, Hamlin Garland had a considerable reputation as a radical writer whose realistic stories and polemical essays agitating for a literature that accurately represented American life riled the nation’s press. Born in poverty and raised on a series of frontier farms, Garland fled the rural Midwest in 1881 at age twenty-one...read more

Product Description: Louisa May Alcott is best known for penning Little Women, but few are aware of the experience that influenced her writing most-her time as a nurse during the Civil War. Caring for soldiers' wounds and writing letters home for them inspired a new realism in her work...read more

Product Description: In this book John Radner examines the fluctuating, close, and complex friendship enjoyed by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, from the day they met in 1763 to the day when Boswell published his monumental Life of Johnson.Drawing on everything Johnson and Boswell wrote to and about the other, this book charts the psychological currents that flowed between them as they scripted and directed their time together, questioned and advised, confided and held back...read more

Product Description: Handsomely produced in hardcover at a very affordable price, Barnes & Noble Signature Editions have been carefully edited and reset in a modern design for greater readability. Each volume includes an introduction, informative notes and a chronology of the writer's life and times to enable the reader to gain a deeper understanding of these enduring works...read more

Product Description: In this special republication of the first edition, more than 300 atmospheric black-and-white illustrations complement the great American humorist's recollections of his pre–Civil War days as a steamboat pilot. Twain recounts his youthful training, describes the science of navigation on the mercurial river, narrates a passenger trip undertaken years later from St...read more