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Cole Porter possessed to a singular degree the art of expressing depth through apparent frivolity. The effervescent wit and technical bravura of his songs are matched by their unguarded revelations of feeling. In the words of editor Robert Kimball, "Porter wrote tellingly of the pain and evanescence of emotional relationships. He gently mocked propriety and said that few things were simple or lasting or free from ambiguity." Of the masters of twentieth-century American songwriting, Porter was one of the few who wrote both music and lyrics, and, even in the absence of his melodies, his words distill an unmistakable mixture of poignancy and wit that marks him as a genius of light verse. Selected from over eight hundred songs, here are Porter's finest flights of invention, lyrics that are an indelible part of 20th-century culture: "Let's Do It," "Love for Sale," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Anything Goes," "In the Still of the Night," "I Concentrate on You," and dozens more. About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

On the 80th anniversary of the war's end, 5 classic memoirs capture firsthand the shock, terror, and courage of the American fight against the Axis powers in Europe "The emotional environment of warfare has always been compelling," writes J. Glenn Gray in his incomparable World War II memoir and mediation, The Warriors. "Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it." The struggle to make sense of the experience of war, to find some meaning in the savagry and senseless destruction, animates the five brilliant and unforgettable memoirs gathered here. Company Commander (1947), by Charles B. MacDonald, describes with startling immediacy and candor the "cold, dirty, rough, frightened, miserable" life of the infantryman and company commander from the aftermath of D-Day in September 1944 through the war's terrifying final days.The Warriors (1959), by J. Glenn Gray, a counterintelligence officer who served in Italy, France, and Germany and a scholar with a PhD. in philosophy, is a sensitive and revelatory meditation on the nature of war and its effects on both soldiers and civilians, interspliced with his letters, journals, and wartime memories. All the Brave Promises (1966) is novelist Mary Lee Settle's memoir of her year as an airfield radio operator in the Royal Air Force. Settle brilliantly evokes both the working-class culture of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force's "other ranks" and the petty and demeaning regimentation inherent in military life.The Fall of Fortresses (1980), by former B-17 navigator Elmer Bendiner, vividly recalls the fear and excitement he experienced flying bomber missions deep into Germany in 1943 without fighter escort.The Buffalo Saga (2009) is James Harden Daugherty's heartfelt account of his frontline service as a Black soldier in the 92nd Infantry Division, as he fights the Germans, endures the harsh Italian winter, and confronts the racism of his own army.This deluxe Library of America volume includes full-color endpaper maps of the European Theater, an eight-page photo insert, an introduction by West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, and detailed notes.

Celebrate America's zaniest and most subversive magazine in 26 essays and comix from all-star contributors, including Roz Chast, Jonathan Lethem, and Grady Hendrix. Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . .  MAD. A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever to be sold on America's newsstands, anticipating the spirit of underground comix and 'zines and influencing humor writing in movies, television, and the internet to this day. Edited by David Mikics, The MAD Files celebrates the magazine's impact and the legacy of the Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. 26 essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny account of MAD's significance, ranging from the cultural to the aesthetic to the personal. Art Spiegelman reflects on how he "couldn't learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents--but I learned all about it from MAD"Roz Chast remembers how the magazine was "love at first sight. . . . It was one of my first inklings that there were other people out there who found the world as ridiculous as I did."David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD's hilarious movie spoofsLiel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine's humorand Rachel Shteir amplifies the often unsung contributions of MAD's women artists.Several essays are admiring profiles of the individual creators that made MAD what it was: Mort Drucker, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Antonio Prohias, and Will Elder. For longtime fans and new readers alike, The MAD Files is an indispensable guide to America's greatest satire magazine.

More urgent than ever: as we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature. In "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes, which he believed supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery. His larger aim was to articulate a view of individual conscience as a force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obedience to a "higher law." In "Civil Disobedience" (1970), Hannah Arendt offers a stern rebuttal to Thoreau. For Arendt, Thoreau stands in willful opposition to the public and collective spirit that defines civil disobedience. Only through positive collective action and the promises we make to each other in a civil society can meaningful change occur. This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, who reflects on the tradition of civil disobedience and the future of American politics.

'"For more than sixty years, Wendell Berry has invited readers to Port William, Kentucky, a fictional setting that rivals Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, as the most richly imagined place in American literature. Library of America presents Berry's career-spanning masterpiece of storytelling for the first time as a single chronological narrative. This second volume gathers twenty-three stories and two novels that chronicle the lives of the Port William Membership from 1945 to 1978"--

In 1 volume, 3 classic early works by the Southern physician-turned-novelist who galvanized American literature with stories of spiritual searching amid modern angst Includes the landmark, National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer, in a fully annotation edition A physician-turned-writer and self-described diagnostician of "the malaise," Percy plumbed the depths of modern American angst and alienation as few other writers have. Now he joins the Library of America series with a volume collecting his first 3 books. The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, is the story of John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who finds in movies a resplendent reality that lifts him, for a time, out of the mire of everydayness. Binx is a modern-day pilgrim whose progress unfolds in what editor Paul Elie calls "the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours." In The Last Gentleman (1966), Percy portrays another troubled, searching young man, this time a southerner living in New York whose intermitent amnesia and odd moments of déjà vu lead him to imagine that the world catastrophe everyone fears has already occurred. A satirical work of speculative fiction, Love in the Ruins (1971) introduces lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Thomas More, inventor of the lapsometer, a devise that measures the spiritual sickness of a near-apocalyptic America torn apart by the forces of the far right and left. Rounding out the volume are three short nonfiction pieces by Percy: his speech upon accepting the National Book Award, his special message to readers of the Franklin edition of The Moviegoer, and his address to the Publicists' Association of the National Book Awards concerning Love in the Ruins.

"A deluxe hardcover edition of Keller's classic memoir The Story of My Life--presented in complete and unredacted form--along with the brilliant, still-underappreciated personal essays of The World I Live In, in which Keller reflects on the senses, language, philosophy, dreams, and belief. Includes a selection of more than a dozen essays, speeches, and letters--most of them out-of-print, previously uncollected, or previously unpublished--revealing Keller's thoughts on religion and faith, women's rights and workers' rights, racial injustice, and the peace movement. Chapters from her later memoir Midstream recall her friendship with Mark Twain, and memories of her mother"--

"The 72 columns selected here by editor Dan Barry, more than half of which have not been reprinted since initial publication, reveal Breslin at his best, addressing stories of national and global importance but more often uncovering tales of ordinary New Yorkers, by turns tragic or absurd but always gripping to read. Gathered here are the highlights of his consummate deadline artistry: his celebrated interview with the man who dug the grave for John F. Kennedy, his coverage of the assassination of Malcolm X, his dispatches from the South at the height of the Civil Rights movement and from Vietnam, accounts of his involvement with the "Son of Sam" case as the serial killer who terrorized New York City in 1977, his story about John Lennon's murder in 1980, his award-winning series about the AIDS crisis in 1986, and his disgusted glimpse of Donald Trump conning the press corps during a book promotion in 1990. These masterful columns are joined by two of Breslin's books: How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), one of the best accounts of the Watergate scandal, centered on House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill and his allies, whose success in forcing Richard Nixon for office scored an unlikely victory for U.S. democracy; and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiâerrez (2002), the story of an immigrant laborer killed at a construction site in Brooklyn and of the malfeasance among developers, city officials, and others that enabled the accident to happen. As quintessentially a New York figure as the memorable urban characters he portrayed, Breslin nonetheless transcended the confines of his local audience and became a national celebrity, writing with a novelist's awareness of the telling detail that reveals the depth of a person's, and a people's, character."--Provided by publisher.

This collection of 80 dramatic firsthand writings by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and others brings to life the struggle for racial justice from the Civil War to World War. A vital resource for the teaching of the history of race in America that traces the ascendency of white supremacy after Reconstruction--and the outspoken resistance to it led by Black Americans and their allies. W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in American life. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality.

A radical new vision of the nation's founding era and a major act of historical recovery Featuring more than 120 writers, this groundbreaking anthology reveals the astonishing richness and diversity of Black experience in the turbulent decades of the American Revolution Black Writers of the Founding Era is the most comprehensive anthology ever published of Black writing from the turbulent decades surrounding the birth of the United States. An unprecedented archive of historical sources--including more than 200 poems, letters, sermons, newspaper advertisements, slave narratives, testimonies of faith and religious conversion, criminal confessions, court transcripts, travel accounts, private journals, wills, petitions for freedom, even dreams, by over 100 authors--it is a collection that reveals the surprising richness and diversity of Black experience in the new nation. Here are writers both enslaved and free, loyalist and patriot, female and male, northern and southern; soldiers, seamen, and veterans; painters, poets, accountants, orators, scientists, community organizers, preachers, restaurateurs and cooks, hairdressers, criminals, carpenters, and many more. Along with long-famous works like Phillis Wheatley's poems and Benjamin Banneker's astonishing mathematical and scientific puzzles are dozens of first-person narratives offering little-known Black perspectives on the events of the times, like the Boston Massacre and the death of George Washington. From their bold and eloquent contributions to public debates about the meanings of the revolution and the values of the new nation-- writings that dramatize the many ways in which protest, activism, and community organizing have been integral to the Black American experience from the beginning--to their intimate thoughts preserved in private diaries and letters, some unseen to the present day, the words of the many writers gathered here will indelibly alter our understandings of American history. A foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed and an introduction by James G. Basker, along with introductory headnotes and explanatory notes drawing on cutting edge scholarship, illuminate these writers' works and to situate them in their historical contexts. A 16-page color photo insert presents portraits of some of the writers included and images of the original manuscripts, broadside, and books in which their words have been preserved.

Library of America caps its six-volume edition of William Faulkner's works with a volume gathering of all the stories he collected in his lifetime, in corrected texts Faulkner called the short story "the most demanding form after poetry" and wrote to an editor that "even to a collection of short stories, form, integration, is as important as to a novel--an entity of its own, single, set for one pitch, contrapuntal in integration, toward one end, one finale." Faulkner was a major practitioner of the short story form and keenly sensitive to its aesthetic demands. The Library of America edition of the collected writings of William Faulkner culminates with this volume presenting all the stories the author gathered for his book collections, in newly edited and authoritative texts. This is Faulkner as he was meant to be read. Faulkner's monumental Collected Stories (1950) presented the author's first two collections, These Thirteen (1931) and Doctor Martino (1934), along with seventeen new stories, all carefully selected and arranged by the author; Knight's Gambit (1949) collected six stories about attorney Gavin Stevens' detective work; and in Big Woods (1955) Faulkner gathered four hunting stories connected with interstitial material. This volume presents these three collections as carefully arranged by Faulkner, with new authoritative and corrected texts that best represent Faulkner's intentions for the stories. Here are such well-known stories as "A Rose for Emily," "Barn Burning," and "A Bear Hunt," as well as some of his most poetic--"Carcassone"--and less known, such as "The Tall Men," "Elly," and "Uncle Willy." Also included are Faulkner's stories "The Hound" (collected in Doctor Martino but omitted by the author from Collected Stories), "Spotted Horses," Faulkner's fictionalized autobiographical essay "Mississippi," as well as his Nobel Prize acceptance speech and helpful explanatory notes by Faulkner scholar Theresa M. Towner.

"... the definitive edition of an essential figure in Black and American theater, spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s and including several works published for the first time."--Provided by publisher.

The ultimate Portis: for the first time in one collector's volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True Grit Rediscover a comic genius and master storyteller comparable to Mark Twain"Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." -Ron Rosenbaum "Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Charles Portis's True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice." -Jonathan Lethem "No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does." -Donna Tartt "His fiction is the funniest I know." -Roy Blount, Jr. Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Portis's deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit, the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far lower: an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy. A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. "no one should die without having read," The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.) Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting. Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the "bravest dog in all Mexico." A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis's skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in "The Forgotten River"; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection "Combinations of Jacksons."

"Nancy Hale was one of the most accomplished short story artists of her era, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1960s. But by the time of her death in 1988, this remarkable writer, so far ahead of her time in her depiction of complex women, was largely forgotten. Now Lauren Groff reintroduces this modern master with a selection of twenty-five of her best stories-- ... short fiction that encompasses childhood and adolescence, marriage and motherhood, desire and infidelity, madness and memory"--

The years 1942 to 1954 saw William Faulkner's rise to literary celebrity-sought after by Hollywood, lionized by the critics, awarded a Nobel Prize in 1950 and the Pulitzer and National Book Award for 1954. But, despite his success, he was plagued by depression and alcohol and haunted by a sense that he had more to achieve-and a finite amount of time and energy to achieve it.This Library of America volume collects the novels written during this crucial period; defying the odds, Faulkner continued to break new ground in American fiction. He delved deeper into themes of race and religion and furthered his experiments with fictional structure and narrative voice. These newly restored texts, based on Faulkner's manuscripts, typescripts, and proof sheets, are free of the changes introduced by the original editors and are faithful to the author's intentions.Go Down, Moses (1942) is a haunting novel made up of seven related stories that explore the intertwined lives of black, white, and Indian inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County. It includes "The Bear," one of the most famous works in all American fiction, with its evocation of "the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document."Characters from Go Down, Moses reappear in Intruder in the Dust (1948). Part detective novel, part morality tale, it is a compassionate story of a black man on trial and the growing moral awareness of a southern white boy.Requiem for a Nun (1951) is a sequel to Sanctuary. With an unusual structure combining novel and play, it tells the fate of the passionate, haunted Temple Drake and the murder case through which she achieves a tortured redemption. Prose interludes condense millennia of local history into a swirling counterpoint.In A Fable (1954), a recasting of the Christ story set during World War I, Faulkner wanted to "try to tell what I had found in my lifetime of truth in some important way before I had to put the pen down and die." The novel, which earned a Pulitzer Prize, is both an anguished spiritual parable and a drama of mutiny, betrayal, and violence in the barracks and on the battlefields.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.

A veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce went on to become one of the darkest and most death haunted of American writers, the blackest of black humorists. This volume gathers the most celebrated and significant of Bierce's writings. In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), his collection of short fiction about the Civil War, which includes the masterpieces "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Chickamauga," is suffused with a fiercely ironic sense of the horror and randomness of war. Can Such Things Be? brings together "The Death of Halpin Frayser," "The Damned Thing," "The Moonlit Road," and other tales of terror that make Bierce the genre's most significant American practitioner between Poe and Lovecraft. The Devil's Dictionary, the brilliant lexicon of subversively cynical definitions on which Bierce worked for decades, displays to the full his corrosive wit. In Bits of Autobiography, the series of memoirs that includes the memorable "What I Saw of Shiloh," he recreates his experiences in the war and its aftermath. The volume is rounded out with a selection of his best uncollected stories. Acclaimed Bierce scholar S. T. Joshi provides detailed notes and a newly researched chronology of Bierce's life and mysterious disappearance.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.

In one volume, four novels by "the real Fitzgerald": scintillating, sexually frank tales of the desperate pursuit of pleasure and status in Jazz Age America.Here in one volume are four gripping novels about the anxious pursuit of pleasure and status in the Jazz Age by the writer who has been called "the real Fitzgerald." In the brilliant debut Appointment in Samarra (1934), the life of car dealer Julian English unravels with stunning swiftness after he throws a highball in another man's face. Butterfield 8 (1935), based on the notorious case of the drowned socialite Starr Faithfull, is the still-shocking story of one young woman's defiant recklessness amid the desperate revels of Prohibition-era Manhattan. The long out-of-print Hope of Heaven (1938) shifts the scene to Los Angeles for a noirish tale of ill-fated love. And Pal Joey (1940), inspiration for the enduring Rodgers & Hart musical, presents O'Hara's perhaps most memorable character, a sleazy nightclub emcee whose wised-up talk highlights O'Hara's matchless ear for the American language. 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.

An eminent paleontologist with the soul and skill of a poet, Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) was among the twentieth century's greatest inheritors of the literary tradition of Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, and John Muir, and a precursor to such later writers as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Carl Sagan. After decades of fieldwork and discovery as a "bone-hunter" and professor, Eiseley turned late in life to the personal essay, and beginning with the surprise million-copy seller The Immense Journey (1957) he produced an astonishing succession of books that won acclaim both as science and as art. Now for the first time, the Library of America presents his landmark essay collections in a definitive two-volume set.This second volume begins with The Invisible Pyramid (1970), a book of meditations on the origins and possible futures of humankind set against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 landings. As Western civilization attains new heights of scientific awareness and technological skill, is it also blind to its own limits, doomed to destroy itself like the lost civilizations of the ancients or other "spore-bearers" in our evolutionary past? Eiseley makes an urgent, environmentalist plea in these essays: we must protect the planet from which we emerged against our unchecked power to overpopulate and pollute and consume it. The essays in The Night Country (1971) look not to the stars but backward and inward: to the haunted spaces of Eiseley's lonely Nebraska childhood and to those moments, often dark and unexpected, when chance observations disturb our ordinary understandings of the universe. The naturalist here seeks neither "salvation in facts" nor solace in wild places: encountering an old bone, or a nest of wasps, he recognizes what he calls "the ghostliness of myself," his own mortality, and the paradoxes of the evolution of consciousness. Shortly before his death, Eiseley made plans for what would be his last book, published posthumously as The Star Thrower (1978). Here are late essays on the life and legacy of Henry David Thoreau, the writer to whom he turned more often than any other; thoughts on the "two cultures" he sought to bring together throughout his career; and on the relations between hard science and "awe before the universe." Of particular interest are two early stories discovered among his papers, "The Dance of the Frogs" and "The Fifth Planet." A companion volume gathers The Immense Journey (1957), The Firmament of Time (1960), The Unexpected Universe (1969), and a selection of Eiseley's uncollected prose.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.