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.

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.

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".

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.

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...

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.

Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and...

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...

Abridged Edition Curated Selections from the definitive, career-spanning collection of writing from Anthony Bourdain, assembled for the first time and read by Tony with Dion Graham, Kimberly Witherspoon, Kaleo Griffith, David Colacci, and Chris Patton. Anthony Bourdain represented many things to...

The most important literary biography in the English language — written by a novelist about a novelist, by a friend about a friend, and published four months after Charlotte Brontë's death. When Elizabeth Gaskell sat down in 1855 to write the life of Charlotte Brontë, she faced a problem no biographer had faced before: her subject was both a woman and a genius, in an age that was uncertain whether those two things could coexist. The woman who had written Jane Eyre — who had scandalized reviewers, been accused of coarseness and immorality, been suspected of being a man — needed to be...

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.

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.

This annotated edition of Wells's The War of the Worlds includes: • An original critical afterword, "The Coming of the Martians" • The empire Wells inverted: from the Tasmanians to the Martians • The science behind it: Darwin, Huxley, and the end of Man's reign • A biographical essay on H. G. Wells and a note on the text A volume in CLASSICS OF WORLD LITERATURE from Erato Press. Something is falling from the sky over the quiet English county of Surrey. When the first cylinder opens and the heat-ray sweeps the crowd to ash, the most powerful empire on Earth discovers, in a matter of ...

The fall of Troy. A hero carrying his father out of the flames. A queen on a burning pyre. The founding of the greatest empire the world has known. Virgil's Aeneid is the poem that gave Rome its myth and gave Europe one of its founding epics — the story of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who escapes his city's ruin and sails west, through storm and war and the underworld itself, to found the race that will become Rome. This Erato Press edition presents the Aeneid complete in the classic verse translation of John Dryden, with an original critical essay and a life of the poet. THE POEM From the ...

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 ...

This annotated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover includes: • An original critical afterword on the novel and its obscenity trials • A detailed biographical essay on the life of D. H. Lawrence • A note on the texts: the three versions and the 1928 unexpurgated edition • Historical and literary context on Lawrence's England and his argument A volume in CLASSICS OF WORLD LITERATURE from Erato Press. For thirty years it could not be sold. When Penguin finally published Lady Chatterley's Lover in full, the British Crown put the book on trial for obscenity — and the prosecutor asked ...

The most argued-about novel in American literature — and the one that still has not finished asking its question. This Erato Press critical edition takes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seriously as the brilliant, partial, indispensable, and deliberately unresolved work it actually is. Published in 1884, banned within weeks, defended by Hemingway as the origin of all modern American literature, attacked by critics for its racial language, and read by every generation since as though the book had been written to test them personally — Huckleberry Finn is a novel that refuses to be filed ...

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 ...

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker The Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature...