Best of
American

1955

Notes of a Native Son


James Baldwin - 1955
    His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.--back cover

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories


Flannery O'Connor - 1955
    Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy. Stories include:"A Good Man Is Hard to Find""The River""The Life You Save May Be Your Own""A Stroke of Good Fortune""A Temple of the Holy Ghost""The Artificial Nigger""A Circle in the Fire""A Late Encounter with the Enemy""Good Country People""The Displaced Person"©1955 Flannery O'Connor; 1954, 1953, 1948 by Flannery O'Connor; renewed 1983, 1981 by Regina O'Connor; renewed 1976 by Mrs. Edward F. O'Connor; (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

The Recognitions


William Gaddis - 1955
    Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction


J.D. Salinger - 1955
    Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


Tennessee Williams - 1955
    The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years—the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003–2004 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams&rsquoi; essay “Person-to-Person,” Williams’ notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author’s life. One of America’s greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright’s perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.

Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade


Patrick Dennis - 1955
    It was made into a play, a Broadway as well as a Hollywood musical, and a fabulous movie starring Rosalind Russell. Since then, Mame has taken her rightful place in the pantheon of Great and Important People as the world's most beloved, madcap, devastatingly sophisticated, and glamorous aunt. She is impossible to resist, and this hilarious story of an orphaned ten-year-old boy sent to live with his aunt is as delicious a read in the twenty-first century as it was in the 1950s.

Pictures of the Gone World


Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 1955
    The original edition contained the first twenty-seven poems to which the author has now added eighteen new verses.Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays


Tennessee Williams - 1955
    The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore is a passionate examination of a woman's life as she recounts her memoirs in the face of death. In The Night of the Iguana a group of diverse people are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel, all imprisoned in their own way.

Pick-Up


Charles Willeford - 1955
    Harry just wants to help, but before long he and Helen are both adrift in a sea of alcohol - until Harry conceives the ultimate crime...

The Vintage Mencken


H.L. Mencken - 1955
    The anthology that spans an entire lifetime of writing by America's greatest curmudgeon, with a "flick of mischief on nearly every page."

Marjorie Morningstar


Herman Wouk - 1955
    Released from the social constraints of her traditional Jewish family, and thrown into the glorious, colorful world of theater, Marjorie finds herself entangled in a powerful affair with the man destined to become the greatest-and the most destructive-love of her life.Rich with humor and poignancy, Marjorie Morningstar is a classic love story, one that spans two continents and two decades in the life of its heroine. This unforgettable paean to youthful love and the bittersweet sorrow of a first heartbreak endures as one of Herman Wouk's most beloved creations.

A Ticket to Tranai


Robert Sheckley - 1955
    Beautiful, perfect Tranai, a perfect utopia, where wealth is distributed without governmental intervention, based on individual choice, and there is no poverty…

The Spider's House


Paul Bowles - 1955
    Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures—recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings—The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Potluck Pogo (The Best of Pogo)


Walt Kelly - 1955
    

Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle


Gregory Corso - 1955
    Take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere. These combinations are imaginary and purein accordance with Corso's individual (therefore universal) desire." - Allen Ginsberg

A Bullet for Cinderella


John D. MacDonald - 1955
    I watched her as she toyed with the man, laughing, her tumbled hair like raw blue-black silk, her brown shoulders bare. Eyes deep-set, a girl with a gypsy look. So this was the girl I had risked my life to find. This was the girl who was going to lead me to a buried fortune in stolen loot.

Listening for the Crack of Dawn


Donald Davis - 1955
    He relates his youth in a cycle of growing-up stories, beginning before he enters school and culminating with the loss of friends to the Vietnam War. The characters are memorable: Miss Daisy--one of the six Boring sisters, teachers every one; Daff-Knee Garlic, owner of the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater; and Aunt Laura, who knows to listen for the crack of dawn. Developed in oral performance, Davis's stories resonate in the experiences of his listeners and readers. These stories will teach readers the importance of caring, fairness and respect.

The Tontine


Thomas B. Costain - 1955
    It begins with the Day the Battle of Waterloo was fought and ends at the closing of the 19th Century. Its cast includes Actors, Kings, Sailors, Artists, etc. It is filled with romance.

Philosophical Writings of Peirce


Charles Sanders Peirce - 1955
    It should prove a real boon to the student of Peirce." — The Modern SchoolmanCharles S. Peirce was a thinker of great originality and power. Although unpublished in his lifetime, he was recognized as an equal by such men as William James and John Dewey and, since his death in 1914, has come to the forefront of American philosophy. This volume, prepared by the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, formerly chairman of Columbia's philosophy department, is a carefully balanced exposition of Peirce's complete philosophical system as set forth in his own writings.The 28 chapters, in which appropriate sections of Peirce's work are interwoven into a brilliant selection that reveals his essential ideas, cover epistemology, phenomenology, cosmology, and scientific method, with especially interesting material on logic as the theory of signs, pure chance vs, pure law in the universe, symbolic logic, common sense, pragmatism (of which he was the founder), and ethics.Justus Buchler is author of Charles Peirce's Empiricism (1939), Philosophy: An Introduction (with J. H. Randall, Jr., 1942), and more recently, a series of books which form an ongoing philosophic structure: Toward a General Theory of Human Judgement (1951), Nature and Judgment (1855), and The Concept of Method (1961). It has been said of these volumes, "A fresh and vital system of ideas has been introduced into the world of contemporary philosophy." (Journal of Philosophy)."It is a very signal advantage to have this collection of Peirce's most important work within the covers of a single substantial volume. We should all be very grateful to Mr. Buchler." — John Laird, Philosophy

The Talented Mr. Ripley


Patricia Highsmith - 1955
    In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal but grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley—is up to his tricks in a 90s film and also Rene Clement's 60s film, "Purple Noon."

Poems


Elizabeth Bishop - 1955
    Her first book, North & South, won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award and seldom has a new collection of poems been greeted with such critical enthusiasm.

The Old Order: Stories of the South


Katherine Anne Porter - 1955
    The Old Order brings these together in a single volume, including six stories from The Leaning Tower, three stories from Flowering Judas, and the short novel “Old Mortality” from Pale Horse, Pale Rider.The source --The old order --The witness --The circus --The last leaf --The grave --The jilting of Granny Weatherall --He --Magic --Old mortality

My Mother's Sabbath Days: A Memoir


Chaim Grade - 1955
    Centered on the figure of Grade's mother, Vella - simple, pious, hard-working - this is a richly detailed account of the ghetto of his youth, of the lives of the rabbis, the wives, the tradesmen, the peddlers, and the scholars. We see Vella, desperate after losing her husband, become a fruit-peddler, struggling to survive poverty and to remain true to her faith in the face of human pettiness and cruelty. We follow Grade as he walks in the footsteps of his scholar father, a champion of enlightenment; we see him entering marriage, and his mother finding some peace of mind in a marriage of her own - all of this in a world recalled with extraordinary physical and emotional intensity. Then, World War II. The partition of Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany is followed by the new German invasion of June 1941. Grade - believing, as do so many others, that the Nazis pose a danger chiefly to able-bodied men like himself - flees into Russia. In his travels on foot and by train he meets a fascinating, kaleidoscopic array of characters: the disillusioned Communist Lev Kogan; the durachok, or simpleton, a young prisoner who, mistaken for a German spy, is shot when he jumps from a train; the once-prosperous lawyer, Orenstein, who virtually becomes a beggar, dies and is buried by strangers in a remote Central Asian village. With the war's end, Grade returns to Vilna - to find the ghetto in ruins, to learn that his wife and his mother have gone to their deaths - and he is left with nothing but memories. But it is here, amid the devastation of a people, that he finds the compulsion and the passion to commit to paper the world that has been lost.

The Voice Of The Desert, A Naturalist's Interpretation


Joseph Wood Krutch - 1955
    The what and why of desert country -- It suits him fine -- Strange forest -- How they got that way -- He was there before Coronado -- The moth and the candle -- The mouse that never drinks -- Settlers, old and new -- And every single one of them is right -- First on the mountain top -- Love in the desert -- Conservation is not enough -- The mystique of the desert.

The Golden Argosy: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Short Stories in the English Language


Van H. Cartmell - 1955
    Cartmell, and published by Dial Press in 1955. It is famous for being the favorite book of novelist Stephen King.Stories• I'm a fool by Sherwood Anderson• The happy hypocrite by Max Beerbohm• The devil and Daniel Webster by Stephen Vincent Benét• The damned thing by Ambrose Bierce• The Chink and the child by Thomas Burke• Paul's case by Willa Cather• Back for Christmas by John Collier• Youth by Joseph Conrad• The bar sinister by Richard Harding Davis• The Red-Headed League by Arthur Conan Doyle• A rose for Emily by William Faulkner• Old Man Minick by Edna Ferber• The rich boy by F. Scott Fitzgerald• The celestial omnibus by E.M. Forster• The three strangers by Thomas Hardy• The outcasts of Poker Flat by Bret Harte• The killers by Ernest Hemingway• The gift of the Magi by O. Henry• The Gioconda smile by Aldous Huxley• The monkey's paw by W.W. Jacobs• The man who would be king by Rudyard Kipling• The incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney by Rudyard Kipling• Champion by Ring Lardner• To build a fire by Jack London• The fly by Katherine Mansfield• Rain by W. Somerset Maugham• Big blonde by Dorothy Parker• The murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe• The gold-bug by Edgar Allan Poe• Flowering Judas by Katherine Anne Porter• Tobermory by Saki• The leader of the people by John Steinbeck• Markheim by Robert L. Stevenson• A lodging for the night by Robert L. Stevenson• The lady or the tiger? by Frank R. Stockton• Monsieur Beaucaire by Booth Tarkington• The secret life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber• The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain• The other wise man by Henry Van Dyke• Chickamauga by Thomas Wolfe

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties


Countee Cullen - 1955
    His stated purpose at the time was to bring together a miscellany of deeply appreciated but scattered verse. Beginning with the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who, though there were black poets before him, is generally credited as the first black poet to make a deep impression on the literary world, the book includes the writings of James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Faucet, Sterling A. Brown, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen himself, to name only a few.Each poem includes poignant biographical notes written by the poets themselves, with the exception of the notes on Dunbar (written by his wife), Joseph S. Cotter, Jr. (written by his father), and Lula Weeden (written by her mother).Most of the poets became well known and widely published in the years that followed. These poems remain powerful statements of what it means to be human, whatever the race.Long out of print, "Caroling Dusk" is a valuable addition to the body of black literature. This is the first time the anthology has appeared in a paperback edition.

Innocence Under the Elms


Louise Dickinson Rich - 1955
    No description available.

The Littlest Snowman


Charles Tazewell - 1955
    He had to make sure there was snow for Christmas. Otherwise, Santa Claus might not be able to come to Lily and Bo's house. So his journey begins and takes him from an ice cream truck to a refrigerated train car, on the back of a giant bird to a scary confrontation with the giant snowmen who live at the North Pole. Finally, the Littlest Snowman makes it to Santa's house on Christmas Eve. But is he too late? Will he find a way to save Christmas for the children he loves?

A Child's First Book of American History


Earl Schenck Miers - 1955
    Here are the explorers, the Indians, the settlers and fur trappers, the soldiers, the statesmen, the men and women who have shaped our country and its destiny. It is a continuous take of adventure, of wars, of industry and invention, of hardship and growth; it is an unparalleled tale of courage, high ideals, hard work--and a precious thing called Freedom.Perhaps more happened, faster, in the history of this country than in any other. Earl Schenck Miers tells its story as it should be told: in terms of the great moments and events, and through the lives and experiences of individuals.Among the fifty chapters included are: the faith and longing for freedom of worship that brought the band of Pilgrims to Plymouth's shores; James Smith's own account of his capture by the Indians in 1755; excerpts from Davy Crockett's diary, telling of the last days of the Alamo massacre; a young Southern girl's description of the burning of Columbia, S.C., in the Civil War. Miers has recreated unforgettably, the hardships of a cattle drive, the inspiring story of how Booker T. Washington overcame great obstacles to build a school, the suspense that held America in a spell in 1927 when a young man named Lindbergh flew to Paris by himself.This telling of the American story is dramatic, ever engrossing--and it is based on careful scholarship. The more than 200 illustrations by James Daugherty--most of them in color--are an integral part of the book. A great artist and a superb scholar-storyteller have joined forces to produce a memorable record--an instructive, immensely readable and heart-warming book about the country we love.

Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties


Murray Kempton - 1955
    Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the "ruins and monuments of the Thirties" include Paul Robeson, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders Walter Reuther and Joe Curran.

The Age of Reform


Richard Hofstadter - 1955
    It examines the passion for progress and reform that colored the entire period from 1890 to 1940 -- with startling and stimulating results. it searches out the moral and emotional motives of the reformers the myths and dreams in which they believed, and the realities with which they had to compromise.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Sargasso of Space


Andre Norton - 1955
    In Sargasso of Space, the Solar Queen free traders win exclusive rights to trade with the planet Limbo, but the crew arrives to find most of the planet’s surface charred, with little signs of life. They find a valley with life, but others may still lurk. Worse yet, a strange force threatens to cripple the Queen. They must solve the planet’s mysteries if they hope to escape not only with tradable goods, but their lives.First of the "Solar Queen" adventures, originally published under the pseudonym "Andrew North." This is the second ace edition.

P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray


T. Harry Williams - 1955
    Harry Williams' P. G. T. Beauregard is universally regarded as "the first authoritative portrait of the Confederacy's always dramatic, often perplexing" general (Chicago Tribune). Chivalric, arrogant, and of exotic Creole Louisiana origin, Beauregard participated in every phase of the Civil War from its beginning to its end. He rigidly adhered to the principles of war derived from his studies of Jomini and Napoleon, and yet many of his battle plans were rejected by his superiors, who regarded him as excitable, unreliable, and contentious. After the war, Beauregard was almost the only prominent Confederate general who adapted successfully to the New South, running railroads and later supervising the notorious Louisiana Lottery. This paradox of a man who fought gallantly to defend the Old South and then helped industrialize it is the fascinating subject of Williams' superb biography.

Land They Fought For


Clifford Dowdey - 1955
    

Of Missing Persons


Jack Finney - 1955
    Free online fiction.Believe! Believe Now! There'll never be a second chance.Originally published Good Housekeeping, March 1955places: New York, NY: Acme Travel Bureau, West 42nd Street, Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue, Lexington Avenue, Acme Depot, Long Island; Verna: The Colony

Potluck Cookery


Beverly Pepper - 1955
    She is an extremely talented painter and sculptress and has had several one-man shows in New York City and Paris. She has worked as an advertising art director for a number of American companies, has written and illustrated articles on cooking for such publications as McCall's, Glamour Magazine, and House Beautiful, and designed costumes for a motion picture. Mrs. Pepper, her husband (chief of Newsweek's Rome Bureau), and their two children live in a charming villa in Monte Mario, Italy.

Faith and Practice


Philadelphia Yearly Meeting - 1955