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"Undoubtedly, the single finest collection of Wallace Stevens ever produced." - Library JournalWallace Stevens's unique voice combined meditative speculation and what he called "the essential gaudiness of poetry" in a body of work of astonishing profusion and exuberance, poems that have remained an inspiration and influence for generations of poets and readers. Now, for the first time, the works of America's supreme poet of the imagination are collected in one authoritative Library of America volume.Here are all of Stevens's published books of poetry, side-by-side for the first time with the haunting lyrics of his later years and early work that traces the development of his art. From the rococo inventiveness of Harmonium, his first volume (including such classics as "Sunday Morning" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"), through "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "Esthétique du Mal," "The Auroras of Autumn," and the other large-scale masterpieces of his middle years, to the austere final poems of "The Rock," Stevens's poetry explores with unrelenting intensity the relation between the world and the human imagination, between nature as found and nature as invented, and the ways poetry mediates between them. The volume presents over ninety poems uncollected by Stevens, including early versions of often-discussed works like "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "Owl's Clover."Also here is the most comprehensive selection of Stevens's prose writings. The Necessary Angel (1951), his distinguished book of essays, joins nearly fifty shorter pieces, many previously uncollected: reviews, speeches, short stories, criticism, philosophical writings, and responses to the work of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and other poets. The often-dazzling aphorisms Stevens gathered over the years are included, as are his plays and selections from his poetic notebooks. Rounding out the volume is a fifty-year span of journal entries and letters, newly edited from manuscript sources, which provide fascinating glimpses of Stevens's thoughts on poetry and the creative process.The volume also contains explanatory notes, a detailed chronology of Stevens' life, and an essay on textual selection.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Henry James, renowned as one of the world's great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This Library of America volume and its companion are a fitting testimony to his unprecedented achievement. They offer the only comprehensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, more than one-third of which have never appeared in book form.This first volume focuses especially on his responses to American and English writers; the second volume contains his essays on European literature and the Prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction.From 1864 until virtually the end of his life, James displayed an astonishing range and catholicity of critical interests, touching on nearly every facet of literature in America, England, and Europe. Here are his most important theoretical essays, including his witty and daring declarations of the novelist's freedom in "The Art of Fiction," "The Future of the Novel," and "The Science of Criticism"-a gently ironic title from a writer who regarded criticism as a form of art.Appreciations of Ralph Waldo Emerson ("I knew he was great, greater than any of our friends"), pungent comments (which he later regretted) on Walt Whitman's "Drum-Taps," and assessments of Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, his friend and admirer William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Francis Parkman, and scores of other American writers are joined, in revealing proximity, to commentaries on nearly every important English writer of fiction (and some poets, such as the Brownings) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.These reviews of English writers include James's stunning essay on Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, his provocative discussions of George Eliot, and his tough but appreciative estimates of Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, William Morris, Rupert Brooke, Ouida, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Also included here is his great essay on Shakespeare's The Tempest. All of these pieces are gathered under the author considered, so that James's supple changes in attitude can be followed across the years.Of particular interest, both critically and biographically, are James's commentaries on Nathaniel Hawthorne, including his still-controversial book-length study of 1879. His estimates of his predecessor's work remain highly debatable, but are perhaps more interesting as evidence of his own feelings about being an American writer of a later and, as he assumed, more complex time.Finally, this volume includes two invaluable collections: his "American Letters" and "London Notes," wherein, with unsurpassed tact and grandeur of mind, he introduces readers of his native and of his adopted country to each other.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

James Thurber, whimsical fantasist and deadpan chronicler of everyday absurdities, brought American humor into the 20th century. His comic persona, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, remains hilarious, subtly disturbing, and instantly recognizable. Here, in over 1000 pages, editor Garrison Keillor presents the best and most extensive collection ever assembled. Over 100 pieces include "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and "The Catbird Seat," the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the classic My Life and Hard Times, and the best of The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World-And Welcome to It, and the other famous books. Plus 500 wonderful drawings, including The Seal in the Bedroom and celebrated sequences like "The Masculine Approach" and "The War Between Men and Women." Rounding out the volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, a memoir of the New Yorker publisher, and a number of wonderful early pieces never collected by Thurber.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

From the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been many things to many Americans: a tradition-bound bastion of the old world of Europe; a hotbed of revolutionary ideologies in politics and art; and a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and love thought impossible at home. Including stories, letters, memoirs, and reporting, Americans in Paris distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called "the most brilliant city in the world." American writers came to Paris as statesmen, soldiers, students, tourists, and sometimes they stayed as expatriates. This anthology ranges from the crucial early impressions of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the latter-day reflections of writers as varied as James Baldwin, Isadora Duncan, and Jack Kerouac. Along the way we encounter the energetic travelers of the nineteenth century-Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James-and the pilgrims of the twentieth: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Cole Porter, Henry Miller. Come along as Thomas Paine takes a direct and dangerous part in the French Revolution; Harriet Beecher Stowe tours the Louvre; Theodore Dreiser samples the sensual enticements of Parisian nightlife; Edith Wharton movingly describes Paris in the early days of World War I; John Dos Passos charts the gathering political storms of the 1930s; Paul Zweig recalls the intertwined pleasures of language and sex; and A. J. Liebling savors the memory of his culinary education in delicious detail. Americans in Paris is a diverse and constantly engaging mosaic, full of revealing cultural gulfs and misunderstandings, personal and literary experimentation, and profound moments of self-discovery.

This Library of America volume brings together The Sacred Fount (1901), one of Henry James's most unusual experiments, and The Wings of the Dove (1902), one of his most beloved masterpieces and the novel that inaugurated the majestic and intricate "late phase" of his literary career.Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, James characterized The Sacred Fount, the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as "a fine flight into the high fantastic." While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the "sacred fount" of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously "a fine piece of human furniture." His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James's art of the novel.James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as "a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world." The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James's beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James's supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

From the American Revolution to the present day, public oratory has profoundly shaped American history and culture-not only our politics but our language and our sense of national identity. Edited by historian and former presidential speechwriter Ted Widmer, American Speeches presents the complete texts of forty-seven of the greatest speeches in American history: from Patrick Henry's address before the Virginia Convention in 1775 ("give me liberty, or give me death!") to "A More Perfect Union," Barack Obama's profound meditation on race from the 2008 presidential campaign. Classic speeches like Sojourner Truth's stirring declamation to the 1851 Women's Rights Convention, Abraham Lincoln's masterpiece at Gettysburg, John F. Kennedy's still-inspiring inaugural address, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s prophetic "I Have a Dream" speech, and Ronald Reagan's clarion call at the Brandenburg Gate come together to form a dynamic portrait of our ongoing struggle to define and to realize the possibilities of the American experiment. For almost thirty years, The Library of America has presented America's best and most significant writing in acclaimed hardcover editions. Now, a new series, Library of America Paperback Classics, offers attractive and affordable books that bring The Library of America's authoritative texts within easy reach of every reader. This book features detailed biographical notes about the speakers, an essay on the choice of the texts, and explanatory notes.

For the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, here is a collection of writings that charts our nation's long, heroic confrontation with its most poisonous evil. It's an inspiring moral and political struggle whose evolution parallels the story of America itself. To advance their cause, the opponents of slavery employed every available literary form: fiction and poetry, essay and autobiography, sermons, pamphlets, speeches, hymns, plays, even children's literature. This is the first anthology to take the full measure of a body of writing that spans nearly two centuries and, exceptionally for its time, embraced writers black and white, male and female. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano offer original, even revolutionary, eighteenth century responses to slavery. With the nineteenth century, an already diverse movement becomes even more varied: the impassioned rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison joins the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and William Wells Brown; memoirs of former slaves stand alongside protest poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney; anonymous editorials complement speeches by statesmen such as Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln. Features helpful notes, a chronology of the antislavery movement, and a16-page color insert of illustrations.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.