"Harold Bloom ... returns with a definitive yet personal book on twelve American writers upon whose work he believes the American canon is built. While his references to American writers are wide-ranging, he focuses on twelve: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane-- those writers whose works make...

An illustrated overview of the life and works of a selected number of important writers in the English language from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

What PC English professors don't want you to know...in Beowulf - If we don't admire heroes, there's something wrong with us , in Chaucer: Chivalry has contributed enormously to women's happiness, in Shakespeare: Some choices are inherently destructive (it's just built into the nature of things) , in Milton: Our intellectual freedoms are Christian, not anti-Christian, in origin , in Jane Austen: Most men would be improved if they were more patriarchal...

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, this book brings together the nation's many voices. From the...

This series presents some of the finest teachers in America, lecturing on some of the greatest literature ever written.

Contains biographical and critical essays on the work of important American writers. Presents scholar-signed essays prepared by experts in the field.

Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. "Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly humorous gusto".--Atlantic.

Presents a collection of short stories, essays, and poems from throughout the year, culled from small presses and literary journals.