Best of
American

1976

The Unabridged Mark Twain


Mark Twain - 1976
    These hefty collections of favorite authors feature their best work, reset from the original first editions that were approved by the authors themselves.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


Raymond Carver - 1976
    In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed us how humour and tragedy dwelt in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life.

A River Runs Through it and Other Stories


Norman Maclean - 1976
    A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.

Geography III


Elizabeth Bishop - 1976
    It contains such masterpieces as "In the Waiting Room," "The Moose," and "One Art."

A River Runs Through It


Norman Maclean - 1976
    There are thirteen two-color wood engravings.Norman Maclean (1902-90), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Western Rocky Mountains of Montana and worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forestry Service before beginning his academic career. He retired from the University of Chicago in 1973.

The Education of Little Tree


Forrest Carter - 1976
    Little Tree as his grandparents call him is shown how to hunt and survive in the mountains, to respect nature in the Cherokee Way, taking only what is needed, leaving the rest for nature to run its course. Little Tree also learns the often callous ways of white businessmen and tax collectors, and how Granpa, in hilarious vignettes, scares them away from his illegal attempts to enter the cash economy. Granma teaches Little Tree the joys of reading and education. But when Little Tree is taken away by whites for schooling, we learn of the cruelty meted out to Indian children in an attempt to assimilate them and of Little Tree's perception of the Anglo world and how it differs from the Cherokee Way. A classic of its era, and an enduring book for all ages, The Education of Little Tree has now been redesigned for this twenty-fifth anniversary edition.

Novels 1942–1952: The Moon Is Down / Cannery Row / The Pearl / East of Eden


John Steinbeck - 1976
    These four novels display the versatility and emotional directness that have made Steinbeck one of America’s most enduringly popular writers.The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders. Told largely in dialogue, the book was conceived simultaneously as a novel and a play, and was successfully produced on Broadway. Although some American critics found its treatment of the German characters too sympathetic, The Moon Is Down was widely read in occupied areas of Europe, where it was regarded as an inspiring contribution to the resistance.In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of Monterey’s sardine-canning district—"a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream"—has made this one of the most popular of all of Steinbeck’s novels.Steinbeck’s long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he heard in Baja California about a local boy who had found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into a parable of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, encompassing a period stretching from the Civil War to World War I, and incorporating, as counterpoint to the central story, some of the actual history of Steinbeck’s mother’s family, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer’s deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance. (East of Eden was a recent selection of Oprah’s Book Club.)

The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow


Opal Whiteley - 1976
    Opal's childhood diary, published in 1902, became an immediate bestseller, one of the most talked-about books of its time. Wistful, funny, and wise, it was described by an admirer as "the revelation of the ...life of a feminine Peter Pan of the Oregon wilderness—so innocent, so intimate, so haunting, that I should not know where in all literature to look for a counterpart." But the diary soon fell into disgrace. Condemning it as an adult-written hoax, skeptics stirred a scandal that drove the book into obscurity and shattered the frail spirit of its author.Discovering the diary by chance, bestselling author Benjamin Hoff set out to solve the longstanding mystery of its origin. His biography of Opal that accompanies the diary provides fascinating proof that the document is indeed authentic—the work of a magically gifted child, America's forgotten interpreter of nature.

A Very Young Dancer


Jill Krementz - 1976
    A ten-year-old student at the School of American Ballet in New York describes her classes and the preparation for and performance of her role in the ballet "The Nutcracker."

Sombrero Fallout


Richard Brautigan - 1976
    Trying to escape his misery, he begins a story about a sombrero that falls out of the sky and lands in a small town. Unable to concentrate he throws the pages in the bin, and that's when it starts to take on a life of its own.

Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849


Joseph Frank - 1976
    One critic, writing upon the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the ultimate work on Dostoevsky "in any language, and quite possibly forever."Frank himself had not originally intended to undertake such a massive work. The endeavor began in the early 1960s as an exploration of Dostoevsky's fiction, but it later became apparent to Frank that a deeper appreciation of the fiction would require a more ambitious engagement with the writer's life, directly caught up as Dostoevsky was with the cultural and political movements of mid- and late-nineteenth-century Russia. Already in his forties, Frank undertook to learn Russian and embarked on what would become a five-volume work comprising more than 2,500 pages. The result is an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting prism.The volumes have won numerous prizes, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.

Three by Tennessee: Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rose Tattoo, The Night of the Iguana


Tennessee Williams - 1976
    Three plays by one of the titans of twentieth century drama, demonstrating the immense power of his understanding of human nature and its frailties.

The Easter Parade


Richard Yates - 1976
    We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

The Bed Book


Sylvia Plath - 1976
    This delightful rhyming catalogue of desirable beds appears in paperback for the first time.'Quentin Blake has matched Sylvia Plath's incisive nonsense verses with superbly descriptive drawings, in a book that has the zest and inventiveness, and the wide applicability, of a good family joke.' - Margery Fisher in The Sunday Times

Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork


Richard Brautigan - 1976
    Poetry

Break It Down


Lydia Davis - 1976
    However, as the characters in the stories prove, misunderstanding and confusion are inherent in everyday life.

The Spectator Bird


Wallace Stegner - 1976
    Joe Allston is a cantankerous, retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me". His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, has not been his choice. He has passed through life as a spectator, before retreating to the woods of California in the 1970s with only his wife, Ruth, by his side. When an unexpected postcard from a long-lost friend arrives, Allston returns to the journals of a trip he has taken years before, a journey to his mother's birthplace where he once sought a link with his past. Uncovering this history floods Allston with memories, both grotesque and poignant, and finally vindicates him of his past and lays bare that Joe Allston has never been quite spectator enough.

The Search for Existential Identity: Patient-Therapist Dialogues in Humanistic Psychotherapy


James F.T. Bugental - 1976
    Six detailed descriptions of day-to-day exchanges between a therapist and his patients demonstrate the events and processes that occur during the course of humanistic psychotherapy.

Generations: A Memoir


Lucille Clifton - 1976
    A father’s funeral. Memory. In Generations, Lucille Clifton’s formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, “born among the Dahomey people in 1822,” who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author’s grandmother. Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. “I look at my husband,” Clifton writes, “and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”

Cruising in Seraffyn


Lin Pardey - 1976
    It is a story of a leisurely sail through the Gulf of Cortez and on through Panama Canal to the Azores and England. Cruising in Seraffyn is also a carefully thought out guide to living aboard a small boat, with fun and economy as the guide principles. Four appendices provide data that is vital for anyone comtemplating long distance cruising.

World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made


Irving Howe - 1976
    Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1976-1998) #1


Gerry Conway - 1976
    Unfortunately…the Tarantula becomes one of Spidey's deadliest foes!

Children On Their Birthdays


Truman Capote - 1976
    This is one of 50 fascinating, disturbing, moving or funny short books published in an appealing new format to celebrate the 50th anniversary of 'Penguin Modern Classics'.

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1976
    He knows what he wants to do with his life. But then he meets Natalie and he realizes he doesn't know anything much at all. A slender, realistic story of a young man's coming of age, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is one of the most inspiring novels Ursula K. Le Guin has ever published.

Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs


Paul Strand - 1976
    Before his death in 1976 at age eighty-five, Strand combed his photographic prints and his many books with an eye to the completion of this volume. Seen here is the summation of a lifework, from the first abstract photographs to the series of plant photographs taken in the last years of his life. Also included is a rarely examined series of filmsÛbrilliant, unprecedented documentaries that foreshadowed Italian neo-realism and the new cinema of the post-war years. The re-release of this volume, which features the famous biographical profile by Calvin Tomkins and excerpts from Strand's correspondence, interviews, and other documents, makes one of photography's major artists newly accessible.

The Moon Moth and Other Stories


Jack Vance - 1976
    The ebook from Gateway contains 11 stories, same as the VIE volume (only three stories from the Dobson edition), and the ebook from Spatterlight contains 9 stories.

How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer


Jimmy Breslin - 1976
    Major contributors were under IRS investigation, and Republican lackeys were threatening further trouble if those donors didn't close their checkbooks. O'Neill sensed a conspiracy coming from the Nixon administration, but it wasn't until the scandal broke that he connected the threatened donors with the Watergate burglary. In the boldest move of his career, he did something that would shock the nation: O'Neill decided to impeach the President. To his fellow members of the House of Representatives, this was an ugly idea. But as evidence mounted against Nixon and his cronies, O'Neill led the charge against the President. This blow-by-blow, conviction-by-conviction account is a gripping reminder of how O'Neill and his colleagues brought justice to those who abused their power, and revived America after the greatest political scandal in its history. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's personal collection.

Women of Courage


Margaret Truman - 1976
    They range from a United States senator to a Native American to a first lady. Most wore bonnets and long skirts; few had college degrees; and only a handful stepped into a voting booth. But these women spoke the same language as their sisters today. Truman's look into the past pays tribute to the courage of American women from the Revolution to the present.

New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985


Robert Penn Warren - 1976
    He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball


Donald Hall - 1976
    Donald Hall's forceful, yet elegant, prose brings together all the elements of Dock Ellis's story into a seamless whole.  The two of them, the pitcher and the poet, give us remarkable insight into the customs and culture of this closed clannish world.  Dock's keen vision, filtered through Hall's extraordinary voice, shows us the hardships and problems of the thinking athlete in an unthinking world.

Ordinary People


Judith Guest - 1976
    Calvin is a determined, successful provider and Beth an organized, efficient wife. They had two sons, Conrad and Buck, but now they have one. In this memorable, moving novel, Judith Guest takes the reader into their lives to share their misunderstandings, pain...and ultimate healing. (back cover)

Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities


Russell Targ - 1976
    S. Army's psychic spy program and the subsequent prominence of remote viewing. The protocols that physicists Targ and Puthoff developed at the Stanford Research Institute are still in use today and have proven again and again in laboratory settings that psychic ability is universal. Targ is the author of three recent books with New World Library: Limitless Mind, The Heart of the Mind, and Miracles of Mind. Mind-Reach is the eleventh title in Hampton Roads' Studies in Consciousness series.

Chapter 29 Revisited


Jean Coleman - 1976
    How does her husband react when he finds a gospel tract between the ham and cheese in his sandwich? Or her children when their mother starts answering the phone, "Praise the Lord" every time it rings? Jean Coleman is suddenly transformed into a totally new person who views her neighborhood as an exciting mission field and a trip to the grocery store as an opportunity to share the love of Jesus. Even a mishap in the parking lot provides an open door that leads to an unexpected miracle.You will laugh and you will probably shed a tear or two as you read how the Lord has used this very ordinary woman to do some very extraordinary things. Jean's transparent conversations with a patient and loving God are certain to touch your heart and her everyday experiences will inspire you to believe for miracles in your own life.

Three Men of Boston


John R. Galvin - 1976
    

The Franchiser


Stanley Elkin - 1976
    But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through the West, Ben struggles with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and the growing realization that his lifetime quest to buy a name for himself has ultimately failed.

The Diary of the Rose


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1976
    When a straitjacketed patient shows an inexplicable ability to hide his thoughts from the machine, she suspects there may be a link to his irrational fear of electroshock therapy. Locus Poll Award NomineeHugo Award NomineePublication: Femmes au futurPublication • Editor: Marianne Leconte, 1976

The Southeastern Indians


Charles M. Hudson - 1976
    Drawing upon oral traditions, historical documents, and accounts by observers and scholars made over a four-hundred-year period, the author recaptures the culture, society, and history of the varied Indian peoples of the southeast.

The Other Side Of Silence


Morton T. Kelsey - 1976
    The history, significance and method of meditation in the Christian context.

Eva's Man


Gayl Jones - 1976
    Imprisoned for the bizarre murder of her lover, Eva Median Canada weaves together memory and fantasy to reveal a life tormented by the brutality of sexual abuse and emotional silence. Brilliantly experimenting with language, Jones infuses her graphic and powerful narrative of the triple yoke of race, class, and gender with a rich musical and oral idiom.

The Spell of New Mexico


Tony Hillerman - 1976
    Included here are selections by Mary Austin, Oliver La Farge, Conrad Richter, D. H. Lawrence, C. G. Jung, Winfield Townley Scott, John DeWitt McKee, Ernie Pyle, Harvey Fergusson, and Lawrence Clark Powell. Hillerman's Preface and Introduction are choice specimens of his incisive humour and his own deep love of the state.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson


Gene Smith - 1976
    

Some Champions


Ring Lardner - 1976
    A sportswriter by trade, Lardner was widely known for his superb ear for the regional peculiarities of speech and notoriously loved for his humor. A must for anyone interested in classic American fiction, Some Champions shares many of Lardner’s classic tales focused on the quirks and pathos of human beings, including their daily turmoils and small triumphs.

The Desert


J.C. Van Dyke - 1976
    Van Dyke, an asthmatic forty-two-year-old art historian and critic, rode an Indian pony out of the Hemet Valley, and headed southeast into the Colorado desert. With his dog, his guns, and few supplies, this sickly aesthete wandered, mostly alone, for nearly three years across the deserts of California, Arizona and Mexico. He crossed the Salton Sea Basin, forded the Colorado below Yuma on a raft he built himself, followed the railroad line to Tucson, then turned west again toward Sonora. His exact route is not known; he did not always know where he was himself. He sought both health and beauty in the dry country and wrote that the desert "never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover". This extraordinary book, composed "at odd intervals, when I lay against a rock or propped up in the sand", is a masterpiece of personal philosophy, containing precise scientific analyses of diverse phenomena-- from erosion to sky colors-- and prescient ruminations on the nature of civilization. "The desert should never be reclaimed!" Van Dyke wrote, yet he lived long enough to see the reclamation projects in what became the Imperial Valley. He did not witness the virtual destruction of the Colorado Desert still ongoing. As poet Richard Shelton wonders in his introduction, "Where are the herds of antelope Van Dyke spoke of, and the gray wolves and the pure air?" This series celebrates the tradition of literary naturalists-- writers who embrace the natural world as the setting for some of our most euphoric and serious experiences. Their literary terrain maps the intimate connections between the human and the natural world, a subject defined by Mary Austin in 1920 as "a third thing... the sum of what passed between me and the Land." Literary naturalists transcend political boundaries, social concerns and historical milieus; they speak for what Henry Beston called the "other nations" of the planet. Their message acquires more weigh

Tom Paine and Revolutionary America


Eric Foner - 1976
    

Chilly Scenes of Winter


Ann Beattie - 1976
    This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend Sam, the Phi Beta Kappa and former coat salesman; and Charles' mother, who spends a lot of time in the bathtub feeling depressed.

Yankee Blitzkreig: Wilson's Raid Through Alabama and Georgia


James Pickett Jones - 1976
    Wilson and his three Union cavalry divisions. His aims were to destroy the iron furnaces and the Confederate arms manufacturing centre of Selma, and to capture the then former state capital, Montgomery.

Presences: A Text for Marisol


Robert Creeley - 1976
    The new introduction by Creeley scholar Stephen Fredman describes how the poet’s autobiographical prose poetry arose in conversation with images of Marisol’s equally autobiographical sculptures.In addition to the introduction, this edition features an appendix of newly discovered material, much of it found in Creeley’s own copy of the original edition of Presences. These include postcards and letters from Marisol, designer William Katz (who brought the poet and artist together), Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and several university professors. The material in the appendix allows the editor to reveal the genesis of Presences as a collaborative work of art involving three creators: artist, designer, and poet.

Ripley's Giant Believe It Or Not


Ripley Entertainment Inc. - 1976
    Fully illustrated.

Smokers by Tobias Wolff


Tobias Wolff - 1976
    

The Catholic Encyclopedia: Revised and Updated


Robert C. Broderick - 1976
    With more than 4,000 entries and 150 line drawings, this revised and updated edition defines new terms and reassesses past definitions with comprehensiveness and sensitivity to recent changes in the Catholic church.

Plus


Joseph McElroy - 1976
    Imp Plus, a brain removed from an individual with a wife and child, begins to develop self-awareness as it orbits the earth in a space capsule.

Unfinished Journey


Yehudi Menuhin - 1976
    In the following years his career was to take him all over the world, playing with leading conductors and orchestras. Menuhin was equally recognized for his committed humanitarianism, exemplified by the championship of young musicians and his work for international understanding. Unfinished Journey reflects the many and varied interests of one of the most gifted musicians and original intellects of the 20th century.

Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876


John Stephens Gray - 1976
    But it is the second part of the book—seven chapters labeled “Facets”—that moves Centennial Campaign into the realm of the exceptional. Here Dr. Gray combines impressive research, careful analysis, and sound deduction to reconstruct Indian movements, locations, and concentrations.”—Western Historical Quarterly