This volume presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended. Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles of friends and enemies, from his "fiendish" Florentine...

Based on research of family archives, presents a critical biography of the renowned detective and horror fiction master.

Before Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great writer, he was a city boy who longed for the broad, open fields and deep, still woods of the country, and then a young man who treasured books, ideas, and people. When he grew up and set out in the world, he wondered, could he build a life around these things he loved? This biography illustrates the rewards of a life well-lived, one built around personal passions: creativity and community, nature and friendship....

Presents the life of Louisa May Alcott, who was able through the success of her writings to achieve one thing that was very important to her--to be able to take care of all her family.

Mark Twain's works are a living national treasury, yet somehow, beneath the vast river of literature that he left behind, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man who became Mark Twain, has receded from view, leaving us with only faint and often trivialized remnants of his towering personality. Here, author Powers recreates the 19th century's vital landscapes and tumultuous events while restoring the human being at their center. Clemens left his frontier...

Explores the life and career of the 19th-century American journalist, intellectual, and advocate of personal liberation. The author tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley's offer to be the New York Tribune's front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took...

"From July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847 Henry David Thoreau lived alone in the cabin he built on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. Walden is the classic account of his stay--his experiment in essential living. This book is framed as a narrative of the cycle of one year, beginning with summer. Thoreau uses the changes of the day, the seasons, and the year to symbolize the quiet revolution that is going on inside him. His specific...

Compares humorous stories Twain told publicly and privately with those wrongly attributed to him, and discusses his development as a speaker.

Disdainful of America's growing commercialism and industrialism, Henry David Thoreau left Concord, Massachusetts, in 1845 to live in solitude in the woods by Walden Pond. Walden, the classic account of his stay there, conveys at once a naturalist's wonder at the commonplace and a Transcendentalist's yearning for spiritual truth and self-reliance. But even as Thoreau disentangled himself from worldly matters, his solitary musings were often disturbed...

An account of life on the Mississippi in the old steamboat days and Twain's experiences as a pilot.