A look into the daily life of one of America's great memoirists At seventy-seven Doris Grumbach is as sharp as ever, and in Life in a Day she examines the experiences of her later years, from the dreaded writer's block to the many hours she has spent reading to the effects of an increasingly modern and interconnected world. Imbued with Grumbach's characteristic candor and verve, Life in a Day is a celebration of the meaning to be found in the quotidian....

Available for the first time and collected in one volume, the letters of one of America's most beloved authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder--a treasure trove that offers new and unexpected understanding of her life and work. The letters provide a vibrant, deeply personal portrait of this revered American author, illuminating her thoughts, travels, philosophies, writing career, and dealings with family, friends, and fans as never before. Gathered from museums,...

Drawing on thousands of pages of letters, journals, manuscripts, and Wilder's personal archives, biographer Penelope Niven explores the professional life of the playwright and novelist, revealing an enigmatic and private man who wandered the world and wrote for and about everybody.--From publisher description.

Hans Christian Andersen was a master of other literary forms besides the fairy story - in particular, the novella for an adult readership. The Ice Virgin (1862) is the most ambitious and searching of all his narratives. Its subject is Switzerland, which Andersen saw as a paradigm of the human condition. The relationship between a gifted young climber-hunter from the remote Bernese Oberland and a prosperous miller's daughter from a comfortable French-speaking...

Ambrose Bierce didn't just write about the Civil War, he lived through it-on the battlefields and over the graves-and in doing so gave birth to a literary chronicle of men at war previously unseen in the American literary canon. The fact that some of these stories verged on the supernatural, others on factual reporting, and others on the fine line between humor and morbidity in no way detracts from their resonance to both the history of the war between...

Plain Speaking is the bestselling book based on conversations between Merle Miller and the thirty-third President of the United States, Harry S. Truman. From these interviews, as well as others who knew him over the years, Miller transcribes Truman's feisty takes on everything from his personal life, military service, and political career to the challenges he faced in taking the office during the final days of World War II and the beginning of the...

From one of America's greatest literary critics comes Edmund Wilson's insightful and candid record of the 1930's, The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. Here, continuing from Wilson's previous journal, The Twenties, the narrator moves from the youthful concerns of the Jazz Age to his more substantial middle years, exploring the decade's plunge from affluence and exploring the tenets of Communism. His personal life is also amply...

The author recounts her midlife round-the-world journey in search of lost elements from her actress grandmother's life after discovering the latter's hidden cache of diaries, letters, and scrapbooks

Drawing on a lifetime of journalistic encounters with the great and the famous, Alistair Cooke profiles the six extraordinary men who impressed him the most Over the course of his sixty-year career as a broadcaster, television host, and newspaper reporter, Alistair Cooke met many remarkable people of the twentieth century. This entertaining and insightful collection shares his unique, often startling personal vision of six key figures from the worlds...

"Over the course of his career, George Orwell wrote about many things, but no matter what he wrote the goal was to get at the fundamental truths of the world. He had no place for dissemblers, liars, conmen, or frauds, and he made his feelings well-known. In Orwell on Truth, excerpts from across Orwell's career show how his writing and worldview developed over the decades, profoundly shaped by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and further by...