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.

    In his brief, often turbulent life, he left enduring evidence of his unwavering intensity, observant eye, and sometimes savage wit.This Library of America volume collects his fiction along with his extraordinary experiment in what might be called prophetic journalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that began as an assignment from Fortune magazine to report on the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, and that expanded into a vast and unique mix of reporting, poetic meditation, and anguished self-revelation that Agee described as “an effort in human actuality.” A 64-page photo insert reproduces Evans’s now-iconic photographs from the expanded 1960 edition.A Death in the Family, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that he worked on for over a decade and that was published posthumously in 1957, recreates in stunningly evocative prose Agee’s childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the upheaval his family experienced after his father’s death in a car accident when Agee was six years old. A whole world, with its sensory vividness and social constraints, comes to life in this child’s-eye view of a few catastrophic days. It is presented here for the first time in a text with corrections based on Agee’s manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.This volume also includes The Morning Watch (1951), an autobiographical novella that reflects Agee’s deep involvement with religious questions, and three short stories: “Death in the Desert,” “They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Not Reap,” and the remarkable allegory “A Mother’s Tale.”

    Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted wordplay of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young America, and the earthiness of a lover of nature.Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year’s “Life in the Woods.” “Simplify, simplify” is the beat of its “more distant drummer”—to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life’s essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and nonhuman in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature.The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. It describes the virgin rivers and forests of Maine, the customs of woodsmen and Indian guides, the hunting of moose, and the effects of the timber industry and encroaching settlement. An early and eloquent plea for conservation by a far-sighted naturalist, its close observation of the American wild becomes an examination of “the motives which carry men into the wilderness.”Cape Cod is the bleakest of Thoreau’s works, resembling Melville’s prose in its vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Cape Cod appears as both ocean and desert, a vast expanse of shipwrecks and barren soil, peopled by hardy, weathered inhabitants who seem survivors from the age of the first Pilgrims. Based upon his own visits and upon accounts from the earliest times, it is an unsentimental study of human endurance in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay.

    Featuring: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, Michael McClure, and more.

    This comprehensive collection includes all his most accomplished and best-known works: five novels, short stories, journalism, war correspondence, and his two completed books of poetry.Here are the classic novels he published in a span of five years: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), about a young and confused Union soldier under fire for the first time; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a vivid portrait of slum life and a young girl’s fall; George’s Mother (1896), about New York’s Bowery and its effect on a young workingman fresh from the country; The Third Violet (1897), the story of a bohemian artist’s country romance; and The Monster (1899), a novella about sacrifice and rescue, guilt and isolation.Among his short stories are such masterpieces as “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” His prose is at the same time dense and lean, suited to his description of the elusive forces that impinge upon his characters, and suited also to his desire not to circumscribe them with traditional moral and interpretive definition. Included here as well are the Whilomville stories of children and childhood in small-town America and the Sullivan County sketches of turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural life.As a journalist, Crane covered the Spanish-American War and the Greco-Turkish War, traveled through Mexico and the West, and reported on the seamier sides of New York City life; the best of his dispatches are gathered here. Also featured are both of Crane’s collections of epigrammatic free verse—The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899)—and selections from his uncollected poems. His poetry shows strong affinities to Emily Dickinson, while also anticipating the Imagist movement later in the twentieth century.This is the most substantial gathering of Crane’s work ever made available in one volume; it is an enduring testimony to his heroic achievement.

    "Complete Novels" gathers all of Welty's longer fiction, from "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942) to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972).

    This is Faulkner as he was meant to be read.In these four novels we can track Faulkner's extraordinary evolution as, over the course of a few years, he discovers and masters the mode and matter of his greatest works. Soldiers' Pay (1926) expresses the disillusionment provoked by World War I through its account of the postwar experiences of homecoming soldiers, including a severely wounded R.A.F. pilot, in a style of restless experimentation. In Mosquitoes (1927), a raucous satire of artistic poseurs, many of them modeled after acquaintances of Faulkner in New Orleans, he continues to try out a range of stylistic approaches as he chronicles an ill-fated cruise on Lake Pontchartrain.With the sprawling Flags in the Dust (published in truncated form in 1929 as Sartoris), Faulkner began his exploration of the mythical region of Mississippi that was to provide the setting for most of his subsequent fiction. Drawing on family history from the Civil War and after, and establishing many characters who recur in his later books, Flags in the Dust marks the crucial turning point in Faulkner's evolution as a novelist.The volume concludes with Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929). This multilayered telling of the decline of the Compson clan over three generations, with its complex mix of narrative voices and its poignant sense of isolation and suffering within a family, is one of the most stunningly original American novels.

    This Library of America volume collects all three of Bellow’s early works, beginning with Dangling Man (1944), an incisive character study cast in the form of a diary that depicts the anguish and uncertainty of a man known only as Joseph. Expecting to be deployed to the war overseas, Joseph quits his job and finds himself increasingly on edge when his draft board defers his enlistment. The first of his many books to take place in Chicago, Dangling Man is a spare, haunting novel in which Bellow lays bare Joseph’s dilemma with rigorous precision and subtlety.The Victim (1947), which Bellow described as “a novel whose theme is guilt,” is an unsettling moral parable. Left alone in New York City while his wife is visiting her family, Asa Leventhal is confronted by a former co-worker whom he can barely remember. What seems like a chance encounter evolves into an uncanny bond that threatens to ruin Leventhal’s life. As their relationship grows ever more volatile, Bellow stages a searching exploration of our obligations toward others.In a radical change of direction, Bellow next wrote The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Its eponymous hero grows up in a bustling Chicago peopled by characters as large as vital as the city itself, then sets off on travels that lead him through the byways of love and the disappointments of a fast-vanishing youth. Exuberant, uninhibited, jazzy, infused with Yiddishisms and a panoply of Depression-era voices, Augie March is borne aloft by an ebullient sense of irony. Winner of the 1954 National Book Award and praised by writers and critics ranging from Alfred Kazin to Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, The Adventures of Augie March has had a lasting impact that shows no sign of abating.

    The remarkable novels presented here in this Library of America volume combine brilliant satire with a lingering affection for the men and women, who, as Lewis wrote of Babbitt, "want "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late.""Main Street (1920), Lewis's first triumph, was a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history. Lewis's idealistic, imaginative heroine, Carol Kennicott, longs "to get [her] hands on one of those prairie towns and make it beautiful," but when her doctor husband brings her to Gopher Prairie, she finds that the romance of the American frontier has dwindled to the drab reality of the American Middle West. Carol first struggles against and then flees the social tyrannies and cultural emptiness of Gopher Prairie, only to submit at last to the conventions of village life. The great romantic satire of its decade, Main Street is a wry, sad, funny account of a woman who attempts to challenge the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of her community."I know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real America," wrote H.L. Mencken when Babbitt appeared in 1922. "As an old professor of Babbittry I welcome him as an almost perfect specimen. Every American city swarms with his brothers. He is America incarnate, exuberant and exquisite."In the character of George F. Babbitt, the boisterous, vulgar, worried, gadget-loving real estate man from Zenith, Lewis fashioned a new and enduring figure in American literature—the total conformist. Babbitt is a "joiner," who thinks and feels with the crowd. Lewis surrounds him with a gallery of familiar American types—small businessman, Rotarians, Elks, boosters, supporters of evangelical Christianity. In biting satirical scenes of club lunches, after-dinner speeches, trade association conventions, fishing trips and Sunday School committees, Lewis reproduces the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture.In 1930 Sinclair Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely for his achievement in Babbitt. These early novels not only define a crucial period in American history—from America's "coming of age" just before World War I to the dizzying boom of the twenties—they also continue to astonish us with essential truths about the country we live in today.

    By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the "Christ-haunted" Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his "Church Without Christ." As in O'Connor's subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. "In order to recognize a freak," she remarks in one of her essays, "you have to have a conception of the whole man."In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is "no pleasure but meanness." The terror of urban dislocation in "The Artificial Nigger," the bizarre baptism in "The River," or one-legged Hulga Hopewell's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People"--these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O'Connor's powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. "Revelation" and "The Enduring Chill" probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.

    Studies in the exercise of power that marks relations between sexes, classes, and cultures, they show James’s special solicitude for the young heroines who occupy the center of his fictional world.Washington Square (1880) examines the life of Catherine Sloper, a plain, sweet, young woman who lives imprisoned by the selfishness of those close to her: her lover, who cares only for her fortune; her aunt, who meddles for the sake of romantic intrigue; and her protective father, who repays her adoration with irony and wit. Set in the New York of the 1840s, Washington Square evokes the still-intimate city of James’s childhood while presenting a frightening moral lesson in the human consequences of manipulation and indifference.The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the story of Isabel Archer, a beautiful, idealistic, and inexperienced American woman who is made wealthy by her uncle at the instigation of her dying cousin. Surrounded by the seductive pleasures of nineteenth-century Europe, she preserves her idealism despite involvement with some who would divert her life to uses of their own—Caspar Goodwood, virile American captain of industry; Lord Warburton, scion of British aristocracy; Gilbert Osmond, connoisseur and collector of beautiful objects; Madame Merle, subtle and charming expatriate of unknown connections, and indomitable Henrietta Stackpole, roving journalist and steadfast friend. James’s many-layered masterpiece concerns the perilous American pursuit of individual freedom.The Bostonians (1886) presents an unusual contest for the affections of Verena Tarrant, the lovely, naïve, and pliant daughter of a mesmerist lecturer. She is courted by two cousins: Basil Ransom, an impractical Mississippi landowner now pursuing a meager New York legal practice, and Olive Chancellor, a rich young Boston feminist. Against the richly textured backdrop of Boston and New York society, they enact a drama of confused identity and willful calculation that demonstrates the power and the perils engendered by the refusal of self-knowledge.

    This lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendor and abysmal ignorance—the seeming opposite of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic 19th-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 19th-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.

    He set out on a journey that was to last three years, visiting many sections of the country and making friends of all descriptions. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is the result of that odyssey.

    The adventurous and sometimes shocking later works of playwright Tennessee Williams, from 1957 to 1980, are collected in this volume, which includes "Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer", and "The Night of the Iguana".

    In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.