As companion to its volume of Wilder?s collected plays, The Library of America?s edition of his early novels and stories brings together five novels that highlight his wit, erudition, innovative formal structures, and philosophical wisdom. Drawing on the post-collegiate year he spent in Rome, Wilder fashioned in The Cabala a tale of youthful enchantment with the Eternal City in the form of a fictitious memoir of an American student and the enigmatic coterie of noble Romans who draw him into their midst. He followed this debut novel two years later with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which catapulted him to literary prominence and earned him the first of his three Pulitzer prizes. ?The Bridge,? Wilder later wrote, ?asked the question whether the intention that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living.? Set in 18th-century Peru, the book is a kind of theological detective story concerning a friar?s investigations into the lives of five individuals before they were killed in a bridge collapse. An elegantly told parable, with credible historical ambience and psychologically rounded characters, The Bridge of San Luis Rey is primarily a probing inquiry into the nature of destiny and divine intention: Why did God allow these particular people to die?The Woman of Andros, based on the Andria of Roman writer Terence, is a meditation on the ancient world filtered through the sensibility of a meditative courtesan; Heaven?s My Destination, a departure from Wilder?s historical themes, is a picaresque romp through Depression-era America; and The Ides of March takes up the story of Julius Caesar?s assassination by imagining the exchange of letters among such prominent ancient figures as Catullus, Cleopatra, Cicero, and Caesar himself, ?groping in the open seas of his unlimited power for the first principles which should guide him.? The volume concludes with a selection of early short stories?among them ?Précautions Inutiles,? published here for the first time?and a selection of essays that offers Wilder?s insights into the works of Stein and Joyce, as well as a lecture on letter writers that bears on both The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Ides of March.

    Carver Country presents the stark but human reality of one man's world, a man who was generous in his spirit and in his gifts, and who rose above his beginnings - but Raymond Carver never left his native ground or gave up his love for its terrain and its people. Raymond Carver's gritty texts, including his poems, short stories and unpublished letters, combined with Bob Adelman's photographs of Carver's people and haunts, re-create the world of this major writer, bringing to life the bleak, blue-collar towns, people, and places that became the inspiration for much of his work. Includes 113 duotone photos.

    Alexander's relationship with Hilda erodes his sense of honor and eventually proves disastrous when a bridge he is constructing begins to collapse. Alexander's Bridge is an instructive, thought-provoking study of a man's growing awareness of his loss of integrity. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

    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.

    Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers his work in other genres, including stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters.When West died in a California highway accident in 1940 at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little known outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers: William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, S. J. Perelman, and others. Not until West’s four novels were reissued in the late 1950s was he acknowledged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. His masterpieces Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, with their blending of manic farce and despairing compassion, and their vision of an America awash in its own mass-produced fantasies, read like a prophecy of much that was to come in American literature and life.Each of West’s novels is distinct in style and theme. In the Dada-inspired The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), he freely mixes high-flown literary and religious allusions with erotic and scatological humor. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) presents, in a series of grotesque, starkly etched episodes, the spiritual breakdown of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ suffering. By contrast, A Cool Million (1934) reduces the eternal optimism of Horatio Alger’s novels to a brutal, cartoonish farce. In his last work, The Day of the Locust (1939), West renders with hallucinatory precision the reverse side of the Hollywood dream, as he choreographs a cast of failures, has-beens, and deluded glamour-seekers in what becomes an apocalyptic dance of death.Also included is a generous sampling of West’s other surviving work, ranging from freewheeling improvisations and grotesque comic tales to more mainstream work written with Hollywood or Broadway in mind, and including his anti-war satire Good Hunting and his adaptation of Francis Ile’s famous crime novel Before the Fact. The uncollected West shows him as a writer who embodied the contradictions and crazy-quilt exuberance of American culture—and raises the question of how he might have developed had his career not been cut short. Selected correspondence with William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Bennett Cerf, and others rounds out the volume and sets West’s literary life in fuller context.

    Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics. Inspired by grief over his father's death and gripped by determination to write the Great American Novel, he draws largely on his own New England childhood.

    In this fictional memoir, Birdwell plays for the New York Rangers hockey team and relates her experiences as the team's goaltender.

    Awarded the Wilfred Owen Prize in 2004 for his poetry condemning U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Mr. Pinter has succeeded as no other of his generation in combining his artistry with his political activism. Death etc. brings together Pinter’s most poignant and especially relevant writings in this time of war. From chilling psychological portraits of those who commit atrocities in the name of a higher power, to essays on the state-sponsored terrorism of present-day regimes, to solemn hymns commemorating the faceless masses that perish unrecognized, Mr. Pinter’s writings are as essential to the preservation of open debate as to our awareness of personal involvement in the fate of our global community.

    It was subsequently included in The Son of the Wolf, a story collection published in 1900.The White Silence is set in the unforgiving winter landscape of Yukon Territory, Canada. The story chronicles the travels of three people across the Northland Trail on the Yukon, as they try to reach civilization before spring. The story deals with the fragile relationship between man and nature, and also between man and animal. Its title is a phrase that London used frequently in his descriptions of the frozen northern landscapes in his stories.

    Left to her own devices, Grady turns up the heat on the secret affair she's been having with a Brooklyn-born Jewish war veteran who works as a parking lot attendant. As the season passes, the romance turns more serious and morally ambiguous, and Grady must eventually make a series of decisions that will forever affect her life and the lives of everyone around her.

    The comic persona he invented, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, is as hilarious now as when he first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker—and his troubled side is even more striking. Here, The Library of America presents the best and most extensive Thurber collection ever assembled.Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber’s extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. Here are the acknowledged masterpieces: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Catbird Seat,” the anti-war parable The Last Flower, the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the children’s classic The 13 Clocks, and My Life and Hard Times, which Russell Baker calls “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” Here too are the best pieces from The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World—And Welcome To It, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. From his other famous collections are included such favorites as “The Pet Department,” “The Black Magic of Barney Haller,” "Nine Needles,’ “the Macbeth Murder Mystery,” and “File and Forget,” revealing an astonishingly diverse mix of literary parodies, eccentric portraits, stories of domestic warfare and inner terror, reminiscences both tender and farcical, extravagant feats of wordplay, freewheeling burlesques of popular culture (from detective novels to self-help fads), and exasperated protests against the mechanized impersonality of the modern world.Thurber’s wonderful drawings—spontaneous creations of which he once said, “I don’t think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes”—are here in profusion, with their population of husbands, wives, dogs, seals, and various species of Thurber’s own invention. His first great cartoon collection, The Seal in the Bedroom, is presented complete, along with such celebrated sequences like “The Masculine Approach” and “The War Between Men and Women,” and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions of once-canonical poems such as “Barbara Frietchie” and “Excelsior.”Rounding out this volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces, previously uncollected by Thurber, including some early work never before reprinted.

    It was the year that ruined him forever. John May's perfectly imagined novel brings New York's giddy pre-Civil War social scene into brilliant focus as it unfolds the spellbinding story of a doomed man and the great love that sealed his fate. By the end of what should have been his crowning year, Edgar Poe was reviled by the same capricious circles that had gathered adoringly at his feet to hear him recite "The Raven" again and again. Swept up in the fervor, Frances Sargent Osgood, then separated from her husband, arranged an introduction to Poe to offer her fealty and her friendship. But what eventually transpired between them was far more than two poets' mutual admiration. Over the course of their brief liaison, the two lovers wrote and published (under pseudonyms) many not-so-veiled love poems, and soon enough, New York's literati were abuzz with their affair. While Poe dallied, his dying wife, Sissy, and her mother were humiliated. And while he despaired, drinking himself into oblivion, Poe's dream of editing his own magazine in New York died on the vine. At the turn of the year, the Poes left New York in disgrace. Deeply in debt and spurned by former fawning admirers, including Horace Greeley, N.P. Willis, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, and Maria Child, American's most renowned writer was a broken man. He had wrecked two women's lives. Even so, both Fanny and Sissy loved him unremittingly to the bitter end. Poe died at the age of forty, alone and having never fathered a child. Or had he? Told with special empathy for Fanny's warm, impulsive generosity as it shimmered alongside Poe's dark genius, Poe & Fanny follows the lovers' story to its logical conclusion: Fanny Osgood's third child was Edgar Allan Poe's. John May brings to life the drama of these lives acted out against the backdrop of nineteenth century New York's vibrant literary world.

    Filled with both public and private writings, these pages give us an intimate view of the writer at work and contain early ideas, descriptions, and anecdotes later used in such classics as The Long Goodbye and The Blue Dahlia. Read Chandler on such classic "Marlowesque" topics as pickpocket lingo, San Quentin jailhouse slang, a "Note on the Tommygun," and "Craps," as well as surprising, lesser-known essays on Hollywood, the mystery story, British and American writing, and a wicked parody of Hemingway. Also included are lists of possible story titles, "Chandlerisms," and his short story "English Summer: A Gothic Romance," which Chandler considered a turning point in his career.At times whimsical, provocative, and irreverent, but always revealing, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler is a fascinating sampler for his new readers and an irresistible treat for his dedicated fans.

    We see him on his travels to Russia, to Bulgaria, and in the beds of his various mistresses. This is a funny, witty book about the world of writers and the quest for success.

    is a searingly powerful and seemingly autobiographical novel  in the form of linked stories  that explores the limitations of memory and the frustrations of the narrator's life, as he cares for his two daughters and his handicapped wife, whose condition worsens as the narrator struggles with his own sense of mortality. I. is hardcover, with cover art by acclaimed graphic novelist Dan Clowes.