Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that will grab your heart and not let go.

    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".

    "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as "A Worn Path, " "Powerhouse, " and the farcical "Why I Live at the P.O." "The Wide Net and Other Stories" (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr ("First Love") and John James Audubon ("A Still Moment") appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler. "The Golden Apples" (1949) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty's favorite among her books. The stories of "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" (1955) are set both in the South and in Europe. Also included are two stories from the 1960s, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?," based on the shooting of Medgar Evers, and "The Demonstrators." A selection of nine literary and personal essays includes evocations of the Jackson of her youth that is essential to her work and cogent discussions of literary form.

    Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

    A consummate entertainer—few storytellers are as dependably funny—he was also a clear-eyed critic of American life. Among the targets of his ridicule were the exploiters, the despoilers, and the soulless parasitic moneymakers, but he reserved his hottest anger for that tribe of scientists and merchants of war who conjure up genies of mass destruction without a thought to what happens once they’re out of their bottles. Yet his works are remarkably free of villains, being rich instead in dangerous, not-quite-unlovable sinners who may yet be redeemed.This volume, the first in a multi-volume edition of his enduring fiction, captures Vonnegut at the pyrotechnic height of his powers. It opens with Cat’s Cradle (1963), perhaps his most exhilarating performance, in which a would-be historian of the bombing of Hiroshima finds himself a privileged witness to the icy end of the world.God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) chronicles the alcoholic unraveling and spiritual rebirth of a good-hearted dreamer tormented by the question “What are people for?”Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)—the book that earned Vonnegut worldwide fame, and one of the great antiwar novels in literature—is the jump-cutting saga of Billy Pilgrim, who, having come unstuck in time, is doomed to relive continually both the destruction of Dresden and his abduction by space aliens.In a text enhanced by the author’s spirited line drawings, Breakfast of Champions (1973) describes the fateful meeting of a luckless science-fiction writer and an unhinged Pontiac dealer who disastrously believes that everyone but himself is a robot.Rounding out the volume are three brilliant short stories—including the classic fantasy “Welcome to the Monkey House”—and moving autobiographical accounts of Vonnegut’s experience of war that shed light on events imaginatively treated in Slaughterhouse-Five.

    The book's unnamed narrator, growing up during the 1950s, is beset by aloof parents, a cruel sister, and relentless mocking from his peers, compelling him to seek out works of art and literature as solace-and to uncover new relationships in the struggle to embrace his own sexuality. Lyrical and poignant, with powerful evocations of shame and yearning, this is an American literary treasure.

    To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget.Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize

    It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.

    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.

    But, despite his success, he was plagued by depression and alcohol and haunted by a sense that he had more to achieve—and a finite amount of time and energy to achieve it.This Library of America volume collects the novels written during this crucial period; defying the odds, Faulkner continued to break new ground in American fiction. He delved deeper into themes of race and religion and furthered his experiments with fictional structure and narrative voice. These newly restored texts, based on Faulkner’s manuscripts, typescripts, and proof sheets, are free of the changes introduced by the original editors and are faithful to the author’s intentions.Go Down, Moses (1942) is a haunting novel made up of seven related stories that explore the intertwined lives of black, white, and Indian inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County. It includes “The Bear,” one of the most famous works in all American fiction, with its evocation of “the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document.”Characters from Go Down, Moses reappear in Intruder in the Dust (1948). Part detective novel, part morality tale, it is a compassionate story of a black man on trial and the growing moral awareness of a southern white boy.Requiem for a Nun (1951) is a sequel to Sanctuary. With an unusual structure combining novel and play, it tells the fate of the passionate, haunted Temple Drake and the murder case through which she achieves a tortured redemption. Prose interludes condense millennia of local history into a swirling counterpoint.In A Fable (1954), a recasting of the Christ story set during World War I, Faulkner wanted to “try to tell what I had found in my lifetime of truth in some important way before I had to put the pen down and die.” The novel, which earned a Pulitzer Prize, is both an anguished spiritual parable and a drama of mutiny, betrayal, and violence in the barracks and on the battlefields.

    Now, The Library of America collects On the Road together with four other autobiographical “road books” published during a remarkable four-year period.The Dharma Bums (1958), at once an exploration of Buddhist spirituality and an account of the Bay Area poetry scene, is notable for its thinly veiled portraits of Kerouac’s acquaintances, including Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth. The Subterraneans (1958) recounts a love affair set amid the bars and bohemian haunts of San Francisco. Tristessa (1960) is a melancholy novella describing a relationship with a prostitute in Mexico City. Lonesome Traveler (1960) collects travel essays that evoke journeys in Mexico and Europe, and concludes with an elegiac lament for the lost world of the American hobo. Also included in Road Novels are selections from Kerouac’s journal, which provide a fascinating perspective on his early impressions of material eventually incorporated into On the Road.

    From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, "Ham on Rye" offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

    The doctors who worked in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) during the Korean War were well trained but, like most soldiers sent to fight a war, too young for the job. In the words of the author, "a few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety of ways and degrees."For fans of the movie and the series alike, here is the original version of that perfectly corrupt football game, those martini-laced mornings and sexual escapades, and that unforgettable foray into assisted if incompleted suicide--all as funny and poignant now as they were before they became a part of America's culture and heart.

    A prolific journalist who made himself a dominant figure in the emerging literary culture of postwar san Francisco, Bierce developed a style of slashing sarcasm that made him a feared antagonist. As a short story writer—whether drawing on wartime experiences or exploring realms of supernatural and psychological horror—he used extreme situations to give voice to his uniquely engrossing brand of pessimism.This volume gathers the most celebrated and significant of Bierce’s writings. In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), his collection of short fiction about the Civil War, which includes the masterpieces “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” is suffused with a fiercely ironic sense of the horror and randomness of war. Close-up portraits of life in camp and on the battlefield offer unique, often startling, perspectives on the war whose after-echoes pervade Bierce’s writing.Can Such Things Be? brings together “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” “The Damned Thing,” “The Moonlit Road,” and other tales of terror that make Bierce the genre’s most significant American practitioner between Poe and Lovecraft. These tales are notable, in editor S. T. Joshi’s words, for “the meticulous etching of the precise effects of the supernatural upon the sensitive consciousness of his fear-raddled protagonists.”The Devil’s Dictionary, the brilliant lexicon of subversively cynical definitions on which Bierce worked for decades, displays to the full his corrosive wit.In Bits of Autobiography, the series of memoirs that includes the memorable “What I Saw of Shiloh,” he recreates his experiences in the war and its aftermath. The volume is rounded out with a selection of the best stories not gathered in the two major collections. Acclaimed Bierce scholar Joshi provides detailed notes and a newly researched chronology of Bierce’s life and mysterious disappearance.

    It is a slave narrative of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery, and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, as well as describing at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana.