literary criticism / american / general

"Provides information and examples of the various authors, works, and literary movements that make up American literature"--Provided by publisher.

Contains fifteen short stories and one poem about unicorns.

Details the making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world. In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of events into his groundbreaking novel. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers, who would forever after be called the Lost Generation. Blume's vivid account reveals the inner circle of the Lost Generation as we have never seen it before, and shows how it still influences what we read ahd how we think.

After moving to Los Angeles, Ray Bradbury became an fan of movie stars, spending hours waiting at studio gates to get autographs. He would later get to know many of Hollywood's most powerful figures when he became a major screenwriter, and he details here what it was like to work for legendary directors such as John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock. And then there are all the celebrities--from heads of state like Mikhail Gorbachev to rock stars like David Bowie and the members of Kiss--who went out of their way to arrange encounters with Bradbury. But throughout that last talk, as well as the interviews collected here from earlier in his career, Bradbury constantly twists the elements of his life into a discussion of the influences and creative processes behind his remarkable developments and inventions for the literary form he mastered. Mixed with cheerful gossiping about his travels and the characters of his life, the book portrays Bradbury's life beyond his literary fame as a writer.

When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin's brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything--Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer's last chance to speak at length about his life and work. The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin's career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience. Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin's life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin's fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual.

"Harold Bloom, named "The indispensible critic" by the New York Review of Books, 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 up what he calls the American sublime. A book by our greatest literary critic writing on these great American writers will be a must-read for anyone interested in American literature"--.

A new exploration of the novel "The Great Gatsby," discussing what makes it great and why it endures.