Classic Biography

“The fire must be kept burning on the altar continually; it must not be extinguished" (Leviticus 6:13). When John Wesley was asked why multitudes collapsed in repentance under his preaching, he gave a simple answer: “I just set myself on fire, and they come to watch me burn.” Across the centuries, God has raised up men and women who burned with that same holy flame—believers whose lives ignited movements, shook nations, and awakened the Church. From Count Zinzendorf and Jonathan Edwards to Charles Finney, Evan Roberts, William Seymour, Smith Wigglesworth, Kathryn Kuhlman, and so ...

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation - certain to become the definitive version - of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

Grab your lace shawl and top hat and get ready to twirl—this is a full-throttle appreciation of the life and voice of Stevie Nicks from one of rock criticism’s most celebrated writers.

Best-selling author and Rolling Stone columnist Rob Sheffield explores the music and artistry of the rock goddess who has kept generations of music lovers totally bewitched and spellbound, with such classic rock hits as "Rhiannon" and "Gypsy".

The original edition of this revered and authorized Queen biography explored every aspect of the legendary group’s career from inception to 1992. Newly revised and updated with cooperation and insight from Brian May and Roger Taylor—and drawing on exclusive interviews with the bandmembers—this book completes the story of the Mercury era and the immediate years after his death.

Ken Rex McElroy terrorized the residents of several counties in northwestern Missouri. He raped young girls and brutalized them after they went to live with him or even married him; he shot at least two men; he stole cattle and hogs, and burned down the houses of some who interfered with his criminal activities. Thanks to the expert efforts of his lawyer and the pro-defendant bias of state laws, he served no more than a few days in jail, the author shows.

Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley—and the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated. "Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This...

A biographical book set in Vienna during the early nineteenth century. Step into the world of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of history's most beloved and complex composers. This biography delves deep into the life of a musical genius, exploring his creative process, personal struggles, and artistic triumphs. With vivid descriptions and anecdotes, the author masterfully weaves together historical details to create an immersive portrait of Beethoven's life in Vienna. From the cluttered workspace where he penned some of his most iconic works to his countryside walks that inspired new compositions,...

Most readers have heard of Ulysses. Few have actually read it. This edition is for both. Published in Paris in 1922, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — and in doing so dismantles every assumption about what a novel can be and do. Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, parody, myth, obscenity, tenderness, comedy: Joyce deploys them all simultaneously, not as technique but as necessity. He was not being difficult. He was being honest about the way a mind actually works. Ulysses — One day. One city. One man buying a kidney for breakfast, ...

The novel that made Thomas Mann immortal at twenty-five — and that the Swedish Academy singled out by name when it awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1929. Buddenbrooks follows the rise and slow fall of a Lübeck merchant dynasty across four generations: a monument of European realism and, at the same time, one of the most quietly modern novels ever written. This annotated Erato Press edition presents the complete, unabridged classic 1924 translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter — the version through which generations of English readers first met Mann — and surrounds it with an extensive critical...

This is the autobiographical novel by Harriet Wilson, the first African-American to publish a novel in North America. Originally published in 1859, it was rediscovered in 1982.

Admiral of the Ocean Sea is Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's classic biography of the greatest sailor of them all, Christopher Columbus. It is written with the insight, energy, and authority that only someone who had himself sailed in Columbus's path to the New World could muster. Morison undertook this expedition in a 147-foot schooner and a 47-foot ketch, the dimensions of these craft roughly matching those of Columbus's Santa Maria and Nina.

This is a short and honest account of how God demonstrated his exceeding great mercy to his unworthy servant John Bunyan. This story specifically tells how Bunyan was converted. John Bunyan was a companion of sin and was troubled by sin. He fought temptation and sin in his own strength and lost, and in despair, he gave up hope of ever finding God’s mercy; but the Lord Jesus Christ at last delivered him from the guilt and terror that so often and so viciously troubled him.

"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places." It is the novel that made Ernest Hemingway the defining voice of his generation — and one of the greatest love stories, and war stories, ever written. On the Italian front in the First World War, Frederic Henry, a young American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army, meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. What begins almost as a game becomes the one true thing in a world that is coming apart. Around them the war grinds on toward catastrophe — the disastrous retreat from Caporetto, the rain,...

A book that contains another book — a fictional play in two acts whose second act drives every reader insane. The play does not exist. Robert W. Chambers never wrote it. What he wrote instead, in 1895, was one of the most audacious works of horror fiction in the English language. This Erato Press critical edition reads The King in Yellow as the structurally radical and genuinely disturbing book it has always been. Published at the height of the decadent movement — the same moment that produced Oscar Wilde's trial and The Yellow Book — Chambers drew on his years as an art student in ...

In January of 1934, Admiral Richard E. Byrd began an Antarctic expedition that would change his life forever. Already a celebrated explorer, Byrd's expeditions were media sensations on radio and film. On this trip, Byrd had an audacious undertaking in mind: manning a weather station alone, miles from the American base along the coast, through the harsh Antarctic winter.

The tragic story of Susan Powell and her murdered boys, Charlie and Braden, is the only case that rivals the Jon Benet Ramsey saga in the annals of true crime. When the pretty, blonde Utah mother went missing in December of 2009 the media was swept up in the story - with lenses and microphones trained on Susan's husband, Josh. He said he had no idea what happened to his young wife, and that he and the boys had been camping in the middle of a snowstorm.

While many of us are familiar with such famous words as, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here. . ." or "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," we may not know that they originated with The Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549. Like the words of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, the language of this prayer book has saturated English culture and letters.

Five men fall from the sky onto an uninhabited island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Within three years they have rebuilt civilization from scratch — bricks, glass, iron, nitroglycerin, a telegraph, a hydraulic elevator. Then the volcano beneath their feet begins to wake. This Erato Press critical edition reads The Mysterious Island as Jules Verne's most ambitious novel: not the boys' adventure its surface suggests, but an elegy for the Enlightenment project of rational mastery — and the most serious question Verne ever asked about what knowledge can and cannot do. ...

Before there was the writer you became, there was the girl who could not stop writing. Meet Emily Byrd Starr—L.M. Montgomery's other orphan, and the heroine she loved most. If you grew up with Anne of Green Gables and have never met Emily, you have been missing Montgomery's deeper, stranger, more personal masterpiece. Orphaned and sent to live among proud, reserved relations at New Moon Farm on Prince Edward Island, Emily is a child possessed by "the flash"—sudden glimpses of a beauty just beyond the visible world—and by a need to write that nothing, not poverty, not disapproval, not ...

Six novels. One life. The complete arc of the most beloved heroine in Canadian literature — from the red-haired girl who arrived uninvited at Green Gables to the woman who sent her sons to war. Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables in 1908 after years of rejection. The manuscript had been turned down so many times she had put it away in a hat box. When it finally appeared, it sold out within months and made her famous overnight. She spent the rest of her life writing sequels she hadn't planned, living a life considerably less free than the one she had imagined for Anne. Anne...