Literature

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1998-10-26, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 181 pages, illustrated throughout with photos in b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. In this moving autobiography, Lois Lowry explores her rich history through personal photographs, memories, and recollections of childhood friends. Lowry's writing often transports readers into other worlds. Now, we have the opportunity to travel into the real world that is her life.

Hardcover. New York, Doubleday, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Very good pictorial dust jacket in mylar with very minor edge wear. SIGNED BY AUTHOR with drawing on title page.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage. Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry's life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband-her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.

Hardcover. NY, Julian Messner, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. A memoir by the Chinese American author of many distinguished children's books. No dust-jacket issued. B&w photos, clean copy.

Hardcover. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 2nd printing, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 259 pages. Biography by Issac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Paintings and drawings by Raphael Soyer. Slight yellowing to pictorial dust jacket, else a lovely copy in clear mylar cover.

Hardcover. Iowa City, University Of Iowa Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the half-title page. 268 pages. In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In this compelling new study of one of the century's most memorable poets, Jon Stallworthy has produced an outstanding full-scale biography of Louis MacNeice, drawing on the testimony of family, friends, lovers, and MacNeice's extensive unpublished correspondence and papers. Stallworthy, whose Wilfred Owen was described by Graham Greene as "one of the finest biographies of our time," has produced another no less remarkable life of an equally haunting figure. MacNeice's mother died when he was seven and Stallworthy shows how his imagination transmuted her ghostly presence, and the powerful presence of his father, into an elemental opposition structuring most of what he would write - from anguished indictments of his native Ireland to poignant love poems.

Hardcover. NY, New Directions, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket that's unclipped. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Revised Ed., 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 428 pages. While most readers know her only from her beloved classic Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys, her journey to become one of American's best known authors was full of twists and turns. Daughter of a prominent educator, her early life was filled with encounters with such notables and Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other prominent intellectuals of the day. But her rise to literary fame marred by poverty and war, and hindered by her unconventional ideas about slavery, women's rights and politics. Author Martha Saxton shows how her transendentalist father, activist mother, and three sisters not only influenced her world view, but became the basis for stories of the March family, beloved the world over. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company, 1st Ltd. Ed., 1921, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a tan dust wrapper with black lettering, 111 pages. A tight, lovely first edition of Brown's first book, a study of the works of the just-deceased and little-known New England poet and essayist Guiney (1861-1920). The frontispiece, a head and shoulders wood engraving of a young woman (presumably Guiney) wearing a crown of laurels, is signed boldly in pencil just below the image by famed wood engraver TIMOTHY COLE (1852-1931). ALSO INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR BROWN on the front fly leaf. Number 11 of 100 special copies.

Hardcover. NY, Criterion, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 603 pages. Classic study of American Fiction from 1789 till 1960. Tight and square. Unmarked, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 400 pages. In 1897 Tolstoy wrote his daughter Tonya, explaining his opposition to her desired marriage: "As far as love is concerned, it's an ignoble and unhealthy sentiment-I would not have opened my door to it." Perhaps this passage reflects the turbulent marriage of Leo and Sonya-first the promise of love and then disillusionment. Certainly, there was a love of sorts-their marriage lasted 48 years and brought forth 13 children-but the later half of the marriage was soured by acrimony, secrecy, and great emotional wounding. The greatest division came with the battle over the rights to Tolstoy's works. Sonya finally got sole possession, outliving Leo by nine years and plagued by the thought that she had been wrong for her genius husband. In intimate and scrupulous detail often drawn directly from Leo and Sonya's diaries, Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) has profiled the disintegration of a marriage. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 497 pages. "The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost's poems . . . Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost's peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost's personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man." -Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Blue Rider Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 336 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white illustrations and pictures throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 422 pages. Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians -- along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the 'art of losing' that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem 'One Art' --perhaps her most famous-- was linked in equal part to an 'art of finding,' Like new.

Hardcover. NY, Random House;, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages. Kurt Vonnegut's eldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty, aged box. Inside, she discovered an unexpected treasure: more than two hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship.The letters begin in 1941, after the former schoolmates reunited at age nineteen, sparked a passionate summer romance, and promised to keep in touch when they headed off to their respective colleges. And they did, through Jane's conscientious studying and Kurt's struggle to pass chemistry. The letters continue after Kurt dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1943, while Jane in turn graduated and worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. They also detail Kurt's deployment to Europe in 1944, where he was taken prisoner of war and declared missing in action, and his eventual safe return home and the couple's marriage in 1945.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket with light tape repairs, 318 pages. Stated First Edition. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, Biblioasis, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 290 pages. Bruce Jay Friedman has done it all, charming the glitziest industries of American golden-age culture for more than half a century. Lucky Bruce is his long-awaited memoir, and it's everything we'd expect and more: here is Friedman at his best, waltzing from Madison Avenue to Hollywood and back again, and reilluminating with brilliant clarity the dazzle of post-war American life. Cameos by Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Mario Puzo, Lillian Hellman, Warren Beatty, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Grazer, Candida Donadio, Crazy Joe Gallo, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Richardson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and the irreplaceable Elaine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jaket, 182 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 2nd pr., 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright unclipped dust jacket. Explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. His most poignant and evocative writing emerged in his sympathy for the Okies fleeing the dust storms of the Midwest, the migrant workers toiling in California's fields and the labourers on Cannery Row, reflecting a social engagement-paradoxical for all of his natural misanthropy-radically different from the writers of the so-called Lost Generation. 446 pages, remainder dot on top edge otherwise clean.

Softcover. Simsbury CT, Mandel Vilar Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 221 pages plus 16 pages of photos. This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status--Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term "intellectual," whose famous 1965 essay "Notes on Camp" won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at The New Yorker. Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions--the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others. Advance Reader's Copy. Clean.

Hardcover. London, Picador, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, SIGNED BY NAIPAUL. Like new condition in a bright dust jacket. The author's fourteenth and final novel.

Softcover. Wilkes-Barre PA, Etruscan Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 304 pages. This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1999, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 292 pages. In the teens and twenties, New York was home to a rich variety of literary subcultures. Within these intermingled worlds, gender lines and other boundaries were crossed in ways that were hardly imaginable in previous decades. Among the bohemians of Greenwich Village, the sophisticates of the Algonquin Round Table, and the literati of the Harlem Renaissance, certain women found fresh, powerful voices through which to speak and write. Enda St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker are now best remembered for their colorful lives; Genevieve Taggard, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson are hardly remembered at all. Yet each made a serious literary contribution to the meaning of modern femininity, relationship, and selfhood. Making Love Modern uncovers the deep historical sensitivity and interest in these women's love poetry. Light shelf wear. Clean copy.