Critical Americans

Every novel Louisa May Alcott wrote about growing up — all eight, in one edition. Plus two critical essays that read them the way they deserve to be read. Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in 1868 under pressure: from her publisher, from her readers, from a market that wanted girls to behave. She spent the rest of her career writing around that pressure — eight novels, dozens of stories, a body of work that kept asking the same question in different ways: what does it cost a woman to become herself in a world designed to prevent it? This edition collects all eight novels and ...

The classic biography of the founder of the Mormon church, this audiobook attempts to answer the questions that continue to surround Joseph Smith. Was he a genuine prophet, or a gifted fabulist who became enthralled by the products of his imagination and ended up being martyred for them? This...

"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,...

The four novels that gave American literature its voice — and two essays that explain why one of them changed everything. Mark Twain invented American literature twice. The first time was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 — a boy's world of summer, caves, and the Mississippi River, told with the warmth of a man who remembered childhood as a country you could never return to. The second time was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, where the same river becomes a moving argument about freedom, race, and the cost of conscience. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from...

New York Times Bestseller One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas. It is not very often that someone comes...

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it." It is one of the greatest novels in the English language — and one of the most demanding. This edition is built to help you read it. The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the fall of the Compsons, a once-proud Southern family rotting from within, through four narrators and across three decades. It opens inside the mind of Benjy, who cannot tell past from present; moves to his ...

Four novels. One writer. The invention of American longing. Edited with afterwords by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Published by Erato Press. This volume brings together every novel F. Scott Fitzgerald completed — the full arc of a writer who captured the sound of an entire civilization racing toward its own destruction: ✦ This Side of Paradise (1920) — The book that made Fitzgerald famous at twenty-three and invented the voice of a generation that did not yet know it was lost ✦ The Beautiful and Damned (1922) — A merciless ...

This annotated edition of The Last of the Mohicans includes: • A 16,500-word critical study, "The Man Who Invented America" • A reckoning with Mark Twain's famous demolition of Cooper • An honest look at Cooper's Indians — idealization and its costs • A full biography of James Fenimore Cooper • Notes on the complete, unabridged 1826 text 1757. The forests of upstate New York, where two empires are at war and a way of life is ending. As the French and their allies close on Fort William Henry, a frontier scout called Hawkeye and his two Mohican companions — Chingachgook and his ...

The complete Oz — all fourteen novels by L. Frank Baum in one volume, with a critical essay you will not find in any other edition Edited with a critical essay by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Published by Erato Press. In 1900, L. Frank Baum created something unprecedented: an American fairy tale. Not an imitation of Grimm or Andersen, but something native to the prairies, the dust, the vast democratic optimism of a country that believed it was inventing the future. A girl from Kansas is carried by a tornado to a land where scarecrows ...

This compelling #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that...

A woman stands on a scaffold, an infant in her arms and a scarlet letter stitched to her breast. The crowd stares. The magistrates demand a name. She refuses to speak. With that single act of silence, Hester Prynne enters the mythology of American literature — not as a sinner, but as the first character in the American novel to choose disgrace over surrender. The Scarlet Letter is the founding novel of American literary fiction. Published in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne's dark masterpiece transformed the Puritan past into a psychological landscape where guilt, desire, and hypocrisy become ...

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator...

This is the first book-length, critical analysis of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's actions at the Battle of Gettysburg. The author argues that Longstreet's record has been discredited unfairly, beginning with character assassination by his contemporaries after the war and, persistently, by historians in the decades since. By closely studying the three-day battle, and conducting an incisive historiographical inquiry into Longstreet's treatment by scholars, this book presents an alternative view of Longstreet as an effective military leader.

Jo March wanted to be a writer. Her creator wanted her to stay unmarried. The publisher wanted a wedding. This is the novel that came out of that war — and it changed American literature. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott was thirty-five years old, unmarried, exhausted, and in debt. Her publisher asked her to write a "girls' book." She did not want to write a girls' book. She wrote one anyway — in two and a half months, drawing on her own family, her own sisters, her own thwarted ambitions — and produced the most influential novel about young women in the history of American fiction. She did...

The book that taught America how to wake up. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau walked into the woods near Walden Pond and built a cabin with his own hands. He stayed for two years, two months, and two days. What he wrote there became one of the most influential works in American philosophy — a radical manifesto for living deliberately in a world that demands conformity. Walden; or, Life in the Woods is not a nature book. It is an experiment in existence. Thoreau asks what happens when you strip life to its essentials — when you refuse the quiet desperation that passes for modern living and ...

Why do we still believe in UFOs, despite repeated efforts to dismiss them? For most of the twentieth century, reports of unidentified flying objects were treated as cultural error: cranks, hoaxes, late-night radio. Then, abruptly, the posture changed. The Pentagon released videos it could not...

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself." With that line, in 1855, an unknown Brooklyn printer began the most audacious book in American literature—and spent the next thirty-six years rewriting it until it had become the whole of a life. Leaves of Grass is not a collection of poems; it is a single, ever-expanding book that Whitman revised and enlarged from its scandalous twelve-poem first edition into the authoritative "Deathbed Edition" of 1891–92, reproduced complete here. In it stand the founding poems of American verse: the vast democratic catalogues of "Song of Myself," the frank ...

Before The Great Gatsby, there was This Side of Paradise — the dazzling, autobiographical first novel that made F. Scott Fitzgerald famous overnight at twenty-three, and announced the arrival of the Jazz Age. When it appeared in 1920, it was like nothing American readers had seen: the story of Amory Blaine — handsome, vain, brilliant, and adrift — moving through prep school, through Princeton, through the First World War and a series of love affairs, searching for who he is in a country that has just thrown off the nineteenth century and does not yet know what will replace it. It ...

The novel that named a generation. The book that taught American prose how to mean what it doesn't say. In 1926, a twenty-seven-year-old American newspaperman in Paris published a novel about expatriate drinkers traveling from Montparnasse to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. He wrote it in six weeks. He revised the opening for two years. When it appeared, modern American fiction began. The Sun Also Rises gave the lost generation its name, its diction, its rhythm of disenchanted afternoons. Every American novel about postwar disillusion descends, in some line, from this one. Jake ...

James Gleick's groundbreaking bestseller introduces to a whole new audience the story of one of the most significant waves of scientific knowledge in our time. By focusing on the key figures whose genius converged to chart an innovative direction for science, Gleick makes the story of chaos...