Robert Bethune
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
It is the mid-seventeenth century in Boston. Hester Prynne, dignified and silent, is led through prison doors to her public shaming by members of the Puritan town. Holding her illegitimate child to her breast, and bearing a bright scarlet letter “A” embroidered on her bodice, Hester must now struggle to create a new life for herself and her child within this censorious community. When her missing spouse reappears, reveals himself to her, and takes...
2) A boy's will
Author
Series
Formats
Description
A Boy's Will (1913) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Published in London and dedicated to the poet's wife, Elinor, A Boy's Will, which received enthusiastic early reviews from both Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats, launched Frost's career as America's leading poet of the early-twentieth century. Invoking such figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy, Frost ties himself to tradition while establishing...
Author
Formats
Description
A fascinating exploration of American identity by one of the most influential historians and thinkers of the twentieth century
According to Frederick Jackson Turner, the distinct qualities of the American character are inseparable from the idea of the frontier. One of the nation’s most influential historians, Turner sets forth his “frontier thesis” in the eight brilliant, enlightening, and provocative essays that make...
According to Frederick Jackson Turner, the distinct qualities of the American character are inseparable from the idea of the frontier. One of the nation’s most influential historians, Turner sets forth his “frontier thesis” in the eight brilliant, enlightening, and provocative essays that make...
Author
Description
The name Kelmscott bears a legendary and magical sound among bibliophiles. When William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1890, he combined his medieval craft ideals with his skills as one of Britain's most sophisticated, progressive designers. He achieved his goal - the creation of books as beautiful as those of the Middle Ages - by abandoning many of the commercial practices of his day. Morris designed types of great elegance and reintroduced...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Featuring prominent figures in education, religion, science, and war, Eminent Victorians is a fascinating collection of Victorian biographies. Beginning with a discussion of the achievements of Cardinal Manning, Strachey provides insight on the Cardinal's rise to power and follows the creation of the Oxford Movement, which began the development of the Anglo-Catholic church. Sparing no detail, Manning's feud with the influential theologian John Henry...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Mountain Interval (1916) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Having gained success with his first two collections, both published in London, Frost returned home to New Hampshire and completed his third volume, Mountain Interval. The book opens with "The Road Not Taken," and though this would become Frost's most famous poem, the collection is not defined by it. Here we find the hallmarks of Frost's work: rural landscapes, dramatic...
7) The Borgias
Author
Description
The Borgia family became prominent during the Renaissance in Italy. They were from Valencia, the name coming from the family fief of Borja, then in the kingdom of Aragon, in Spain. The Borgias became prominent in ecclesiastical and political affairs in the 15th and 16th centuries, producing two popes, Alfons de Borja who ruled as Pope Callixtus III during 1455–1458 and Rodrigo Lanzol Borgia, as Pope Alexander VI, during 1492–1503. Especially...
Author
Formats
Description
Chicago Poems is an early collection of poems by American poet Carl Sandburg. This little volume includes the following poems: Chicago, Sketch, Masses, Lost, The Harbor, They Will Say, Mill-Doors, Halsted Street Car, Clark Street Bridge, Passers-by, The Walking Man of Rodin, Subway, The Shovel Man, A Teamster's Farewell, Fish Crier, Picnic Boat, Happiness, Muckers, Blacklisted, Graceland, Child of the Romans, The Right to Grief, Mag, Onion Days, Population...
Author
Formats
Description
The most incisive comment on politics today is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public affairs recognize this. They...
Author
Formats
Description
First published in English by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 from its original Farsi, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a collection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in the later part of the 11th century. Omar Khayyam's poetry, which received very little international notoriety in its own day, achieved classic status when it was discovered and rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald over seven...
12) Don Juan
Author
Formats
Description
Don Juan is a satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire". Modern critics generally consider it Byron's masterpiece. The poem is in eight line iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme ab ab ab cc – often the last rhyming couplet is used for a humor comic...
14) Fugitive Pieces
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Excerpt: "Fugitive Pieces, Byron's first volume of verse, was privately printed in the autumn of 1806, when Byron was eighteen years of age. Passages in Byron's correspondence indicate that as early as August of that year some of the poems were in the printers' hands and that during the latter part of August and during September the printing was suspended in order that Byron might give his poems an "entire new form." The new form consisted, in part,...
15) Love songs
Author
Series
Formats
Description
"Capturing the sights and sounds of nature, Teasdale depicts the highs and lows of both love and the human experience. Love Songs is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale"--back cover.
16) Flame and shadow
Author
Formats
Description
Flame and Shadow (1920) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet's fifth collection, published two years after she won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, death, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Flame and Shadow revels in the mystery of existence itself. "What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring, / That my songs do not show...
Author
Series
Description
Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach. Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond, on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed,...
18) Karl Ludwig Sand
Author
Series
Description
Fanatic. Murderer. Martyr. Karl-Ludwig Sand was all of these things and more. Alexandre Dumas delves into his fascinating story as part of the "Celebrated Crimes" series. Sand was a devout believer in German unification. At the time, Germany existed only as a loose confederation. In the name of this cause, he broke into the house of the conservative writer August von Kotzebue and stabbed him to death. Tried and executed in 1820, Sand became a nationalist...
Author
Formats
Description
Poet Louise Bogan called this 1897 volume “one of the hinges upon which American poetry was able to turn from the sentimentality of the 90's toward modern veracity and psychological truth." The collection, Robinson's second, caught the eye of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, who was instrumental in providing the impoverished poet a much-needed sinecure.
20) Cornhuskers
Author
Formats
Description
Carl Sandburg fixed his eyes on the people of his time and place. He ignored or scorned the wealthy, the comfortable, the complacent, the powerful and those who serve them; he had no time for the ruling class. His eyes were open to the immigrant, the laborer, the hobo, the farmer, the man who works with his hands, the woman who runs a family, or the soldier who goes to war for them. Not for him the Man of the Masses from a left-wing poster, ruddy
...