Mark Twain The Gilded Age And Later Novels Loa 130

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Mark Twain: The Gilded Age and Later Novels (LOA #130)

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1094 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2002-01-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1931082103

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Mark Twain: The Gilded Age and Later Novels (LOA #130) by Mark Twain Pdf

"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand," Mark Twain once wrote. In this sixth volume in The Library of America's authoritative collection of his writings-the final volume of his fiction-America's greatest humorist emerges in a surprising range of roles: as the savvy satirist of The Gilded Age, the brilliant plotter of its inventive sequel, The American Claimant, and, in two Tom Sawyer novels, as the acknowledged master revisiting his best-loved characters. Also in this volume is the authoritative version of Twain's haunting last novel, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, left unpublished when he died. The Gilded Age (1873), a collaboration with Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, sends up an age when vast fortunes piled up amid thriving corruption and a city Twain knew well, Washington, D.C., full of would-be power brokers and humbug. The novel also gives us one of Twain's most enduring characters, Colonel Sellers, who returns in The American Claimant (1892), an encore performance that moves beyond the worldly satire of its predecessor into realms of sheer inventive mayhem. Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) extend the adventures of Huck and Tom. No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1908), an astonishing psychic adventure set in the gothic gloom of a medieval Austrian village, offers a powerful and uncanny exploration of the powers of the human mind. 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.

Mark Twain: Historical Romances (LOA #71)

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1068 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 1994-08-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0940450828

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Mark Twain: Historical Romances (LOA #71) by Mark Twain Pdf

In the three novels collected in this Library of America volume, Mark Twain turned his comic genius to a period that fascinated and repelled him in equal measure: medieval and Renaissance Europe. This lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendor and abysmal ignorance—the seeming opposite of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic nineteenth-century America—engaged Twain’s imagination, inspiring a children’s classic, and astonishing fantasy of comedy and violence, and an unusual fictional biography. Twain drew on his fascination with impersonation and the theme of the double in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), which brilliantly uses the device of identical boys from opposite ends of the social hierarchy to evoke the tumultuous contrasts of Henry VIII’s England. As the pauper Tom Canty is raised to the throne, while the rightful heir is cast out among thieves and beggars, Twain sustains one of his most compelling narratives. A perennial children’s favorite, the novel brings an impassioned American point of view to the injustices of traditional European society. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) finds Twain in high satiric form. When hard-headed Yankee mechanic Hank Morgan is knocked out in a fight, he wakes up in Camelot in A.D. 528—and finds himself pitted against the medieval rituals and superstitions of King Arthur and his knights. In a hilarious burlesque of the age of chivalry and of its cult in the nineteenth-century American South, Twain demolishes knighthood’s romantic aura to reveal a brutish, violent society beset by ignorance. But the comic mood gives way to a darker questioning of both ancient and modern society, culminating in an astonishing apocalyptic conclusion that questions both American progress and Yankee “ingenuity” as Camelot is undone by the introduction of advanced technology. “Taking into account . . . her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquest in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever known.” So Twain wrote of the heroine of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), his most elaborate work of historical reconstruction. A respectful and richly detailed chronicle, by turns admiring and indignant, Joan of Arc opens a fascinating window onto the moral imagination of America’s greatest comic writer. 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.

Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It (LOA #21)

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1078 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1984-12-01
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0940450259

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Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It (LOA #21) by Mark Twain Pdf

This Library of America volume contains the novels that, when published, transformed an obscure Western journalist into a national celebrity. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It (sometimes called The Innocents at Home) were immensely successful when first published and they remain today the most popular travel books ever written. The Innocents Abroad (1869), based largely on letters written for New York and San Francisco papers, narrates the progress of the first American organized tour of Europe—to Naples, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Palestine. In his account Mark Twain assumes two alternate roles: at times the no-nonsense American who refuses to automatically venerate the famous sights of the Old World (preferring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon simpleton, a gullible victim of flatterers and “frauds,” and an awestruck admirer of Russian royalty. The result is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges the first full-dress portrait of Mark Twain himself, the breezy, shrewd, and comical manipulator of English idioms and America’s mythologies about itself and its relation to the past. Roughing It (1872) is the lighthearted account of Mark Twain’s actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His accounts of stagecoach travel, Native Americans, frontier society, the Mormons, the Chinese, and the codes, dress, food, and customs of the West are interspersed with his own experiences as a prospector, miner, journalist, boon companion, and lecturer as he traveled through Nevada, Utah, California, and even to the Hawaiian Islands. Mark Twain’s passage from tenderfoot to old-timer is accomplished through a long series of increasingly comical episodes. The plot is relaxed enough to accommodate some immensely funny and random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. The result is an enduring picture of the old Western frontier in all its original vigor and variety. In these two works, never before brought together so compactly, Mark Twain achieves his mastery of the vernacular style. 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.

The Gilded Age

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Jazzybee Verlag
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1922
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9783849674649

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The Gilded Age by Mark Twain Pdf

Ladies and gentlemen, there are many American writers today who in their way are great, and many, many more during this man's life have come and gone—but Samuel L. Clemens, the delight of our fathers and our grandfathers, who. with his same brilliant wit and humor was wilting of the Mississippi River and its first steamboat in the "Gilded Age" of the old South before the war, appears with us tonight as young in spirit, as humorous and as handsome as he ever was, and our only hope is that like Tennyson's Brook and the application of steam to navigation by Robert Fulton he will "roll on and on forever."

The Gilded Age (Illustrated)

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : BookRix
Page : 1017 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2014-03-13
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783730989067

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The Gilded Age (Illustrated) by Mark Twain Pdf

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America in the era now referred to as the Gilded Age. Although not one of Twain's best-known works, it has appeared in more than one hundred editions since its original publication. Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with illustrations by Thomas Nast. The book is remarkable for two reasons–-it is the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10)

Author : Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1308 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1983-04-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0940450089

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Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10) by Nathaniel Hawthorne Pdf

Written in a richly suggestive style, Hawthorne’s five world-famous novels are permeated by his own history as well as America’s In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era. Considered Hawthorne’s greatest work, The Scarlet Letter is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. The transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, the innate lawlessness of their bastard child Pearl, and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world. Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar’s love for a merchant’s daughter. The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10) Blithedale Romance / Fanshawe / Marble Faun

Author : Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1308 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2016-01-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781598534917

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Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10) Blithedale Romance / Fanshawe / Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne Pdf

The Library of America presents in one giftable collection all 5 of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s world-famous novels—including The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Written in a richly suggestive style that seems remarkably contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels permeated by his own history as well as America’s. In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era. Considered Hawthorne’s greatest work, The Scarlet Letter is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. The transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, the innate lawlessness of their bastard child Pearl, and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world. Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar’s love for a merchant’s daughter. The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

Henry James: Novels 1896-1899 (LOA #139)

Author : Henry James
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1054 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2003-03-10
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781931082303

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Henry James: Novels 1896-1899 (LOA #139) by Henry James Pdf

This Library of America volume collects four novels written by Henry James in the period immediately following his unsuccessful five-year-long attempt to establish himself as a playwright on the London stage. Hoping to convert his “infinite little loss” into “infinite little gain,” James returned to the novelistic examination of English society with a new appreciation for what he called the “divine principle of the Scenario,” “a key that, working in the same general way fits the complicated chambers of both the dramatic and the narrative lock.” His continued interest in dramatic form is demonstrated in The Other House (1896), which was derived from the scenario for a three-act play. Set in two neighboring houses and told mostly through dialogue, the novel explores the violent and tragic consequences of jealousy and frustrated passion. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), one of the most tightly constructed of James’s late novels, a house and its exquisite antique furnishings and artwork become the source of a protracted struggle involving the proud and imperious Mrs. Gereth, her amiable son, Owen, his philistine fiancée, Mona Brigstock, and the sensitive Fleda Vetch, whose moral judgment is tested by her conflicting allegiances. What Maisie Knew (1897) explores with perception and sensitivity the effect upon a young girl of her parents’ bitter divorce and their subsequent remarriages. In writing the novel James chose as his point of view what he described as “the consciousness, the dim, sweet, scared, wondering, clinging perception of the child.” The Awkward Age (1899) examines the complicated relations among the members of a sophisticated London social circle almost entirely through dialogue as it depicts the shifting marital prospects of a young woman poised on the verge of adult life. Both of these novels insightfully explore the ambiguity of childhood “innocence” amid adult struggles over money, power, and love. 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.

Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162)

Author : Henry James
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 754 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2006-02-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 193108288X

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Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162) by Henry James Pdf

This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel. James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition. 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.

Jack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7)

Author : Jack London
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1238 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 1982-11-01
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0940450062

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Jack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7) by Jack London Pdf

By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London’s own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled “Revolution.” London’s prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined “the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.” Whether he is recollecting, in The Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir John Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it. Though he is outraged in The People of the Abyss by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, The Call of the Wild (in the companion volume, Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London’s warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force. 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.

Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick (LOA #9)

Author : Herman Melville
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1470 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 1983-04-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0940450097

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Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick (LOA #9) by Herman Melville Pdf

Well over a century after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception. 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.

Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings Vol. 1 1832-1858 (LOA #45)

Author : Abraham Lincoln
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 946 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1989-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0940450437

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Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings Vol. 1 1832-1858 (LOA #45) by Abraham Lincoln Pdf

Abraham Lincoln measured the promise—and cost—of American freedom in lucid and extraordinarily moving prose, famous for its native wit, simple dignity of expressions, and peculiarly American flavor. This volume, with its companion, Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writing 1859–1865, comprises the most comprehensive selection ever published. over 240 speeches, letters, and drafts take Lincoln from rural law practice to national prominence, and chart his emergence as an eloquent antislavery advocate and defender of the constitution. included are the complete Lincoln-Douglas debates, perhaps the most famous confrontation in American political history. 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.

John Muir: Nature Writings (LOA #92)

Author : John Muir
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 946 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 1997-04-22
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1883011248

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John Muir: Nature Writings (LOA #92) by John Muir Pdf

Known as the "Father of the National Parks," John Muir wrote about the American West with unmatched passion and eloquence—as seen in this stunning, one-volume collection In a lifetime of exploration, writing, and passionate political activism, John Muir became America's most eloquent spokesman for the mystery and majesty of the wilderness. A crucial figure in the creation of our national parks system and a far-seeing prophet of environmental awareness who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, he was also a master of natural description who evoked with unique power and intimacy the untrammeled landscapes of the American West. Nature Writings collects Muir's most significant and best-loved works in a single volume, including: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894) and Stickeen (1909). Rounding out the volume is a rich selection of essays—including "Yosemite Glaciers," "God's First Temples," "Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta," "The American Forests," and "Save the Redwoods"—that highlight various aspects of his career: his exploration of the Grand Canyon and of what became Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, his successful crusades to preserve the wilderness, his early walking tour to Florida, and the Alaska journey of 1879. 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.

Washington Irving: Three Western Narratives (LOA #146)

Author : Washington Irving
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 1036 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2004-01-26
Category : History
ISBN : 1931082537

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Washington Irving: Three Western Narratives (LOA #146) by Washington Irving Pdf

America’s first internationally acclaimed author, Washington Irving established his fame with tales of the Hudson Valley in the days of Dutch rule, and then spent seventeen years in Europe mining the Old World for stories. When he finally returned to the United States, he embarked on a trilogy of books on the American West that would prove decisive in molding his compatriots’ conception of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Northwest. The Library of America presents this Western trilogy in its third volume of Irving’s work. Irving’s own encounter with the West came in 1832 when he accompanied the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on a month-long journey to what is now eastern Oklahoma. His account of that trip, A Tour on the Prairies (1835), described wild landscape, rugged inhabitants, and dramatic chases and hunts with an eye for romantic sublimity and a keen appreciation of the frontiersman’s “secret of personal freedom.” After the success of his first western book, Irving undertook to write the history of John Jacob Astor’s ultimately failed attempt to establish a fur-trading empire in the Northwest. In Astoria (1836), he created a sweeping epic of exploration, commercial enterprise, and “contest for dominion on the shores of the Pacific,” drawing on Astor’s rich archive of materials and enlivening it with his flair for vigorous storytelling. In The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), Irving focused on a single memorable figure—an army officer and fur trader who may also have been an American spy tracking British ambitions in the far country—to reveal the flavor of frontier life in the Rockies and beyond. 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.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America (LOA #147)

Author : Alexis de Tocqueville
Publisher : Library of America
Page : 960 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2004-02-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781598531817

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Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America (LOA #147) by Alexis de Tocqueville Pdf

An exclusive new translation of the most perceptive and influential book ever written about American politics and society—“the bible on democracy” (The Texas Observer) Alexis de Tocqueville, a young aristocratic French lawyer, came to the United States in 1831 to study its penitentiary systems. His nine-month visit and subsequent reading and reflection resulted in this landmark masterpiece of political observation and analysis. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville vividly describes the unprecedented social equality he found in America and explores its implications for European society in the emerging modern era. His book provides enduring insight into the political consequences of widespread property ownership, the potential dangers to liberty inherent in majority rule, the vital role of religion in American life, and the importance of civil institutions in an individualistic culture dominated by the pursuit of material self-interest. He also probes the deep differences between the free and slave states, writing prophetically of racism, bigotry, and prejudice in the United States. Brought to life by Arthur Goldhammer’s clear, fluid, and vigorous translation, this volume of Democracy in America is the first to fully capture Tocqueville’s achievements both as an accomplished literary stylist and as a profound political thinker.