Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 594
Book Description
The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper first published in 1840. It is the fourth novel featuring Natty Bumppo, his fictitious frontier hero, and is considered as forming the third chronological episode of the Leatherstocking Tales.
The Pathfinder Annotated
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 594
Book Description
The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper first published in 1840. It is the fourth novel featuring Natty Bumppo, his fictitious frontier hero, and is considered as forming the third chronological episode of the Leatherstocking Tales.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 594
Book Description
The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper first published in 1840. It is the fourth novel featuring Natty Bumppo, his fictitious frontier hero, and is considered as forming the third chronological episode of the Leatherstocking Tales.
James Fenimore Cooper: Sea Tales (LOA #54)
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450707
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 942
Book Description
In The Pilot (1824) and The Red Rover (1828), James Fenimore Cooper invented a new literary genre: the sea novel. Collected here in a single Library of America volume, they are among his finest works. Bold, vigorous, original, each is a tale of high adventure that vividly captures the majesty and power of the seafaring life. Cooper drew on his direct knowledge of ships and sailors to present a truer picture of life on the sea than had ever before achieved in literature. As a boy of seventeen he had sailed before the mast on a merchantman bound from New York to London and then to Spain. On board he experienced the life of a common seaman, learned the craft of sailing, encountered terrifying storms, was chased by pirates, and watched the impressment of crew members by a British man-of-war. He later served as an officer in the United States Navy. The Pilot is loosely based upon stories of John Paul Jones’s daring hit-and-run tactics during the Revolutionary War. The shadowy hero, modeled on Jones, leads a squadron of the infant American navy in a series of raids on the English coast, braving fierce storms and the guns of hostile warships, yet never revealing his identity. In this novel Cooper introduced the character of the “old salt,” the seasoned deckhand happy only aboard ship. Long Tom Coffin, with his briny conversation and shrewd nautical advice, is the first of Cooper’s memorable portraits of common seaman. A ghostly ship, an uncanny hero, a heroine kidnapped by pirates, revelations of mistaken identity, and the reunion of long-lost relatives—scenes of romance and adventure fill the pages of The Red Rover, Cooper’s most theatrical novel. Set in the mid-eighteenth century, the tale recounts the exploits of a noble outcast and visionary who foresees America’s destiny as a sovereign nation. Forced into a life of piracy, the Rover conducts his private war of independence in a story that equates the free and daring life with the American dream of self-reliance and liberty from British rule. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450707
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 942
Book Description
In The Pilot (1824) and The Red Rover (1828), James Fenimore Cooper invented a new literary genre: the sea novel. Collected here in a single Library of America volume, they are among his finest works. Bold, vigorous, original, each is a tale of high adventure that vividly captures the majesty and power of the seafaring life. Cooper drew on his direct knowledge of ships and sailors to present a truer picture of life on the sea than had ever before achieved in literature. As a boy of seventeen he had sailed before the mast on a merchantman bound from New York to London and then to Spain. On board he experienced the life of a common seaman, learned the craft of sailing, encountered terrifying storms, was chased by pirates, and watched the impressment of crew members by a British man-of-war. He later served as an officer in the United States Navy. The Pilot is loosely based upon stories of John Paul Jones’s daring hit-and-run tactics during the Revolutionary War. The shadowy hero, modeled on Jones, leads a squadron of the infant American navy in a series of raids on the English coast, braving fierce storms and the guns of hostile warships, yet never revealing his identity. In this novel Cooper introduced the character of the “old salt,” the seasoned deckhand happy only aboard ship. Long Tom Coffin, with his briny conversation and shrewd nautical advice, is the first of Cooper’s memorable portraits of common seaman. A ghostly ship, an uncanny hero, a heroine kidnapped by pirates, revelations of mistaken identity, and the reunion of long-lost relatives—scenes of romance and adventure fill the pages of The Red Rover, Cooper’s most theatrical novel. Set in the mid-eighteenth century, the tale recounts the exploits of a noble outcast and visionary who foresees America’s destiny as a sovereign nation. Forced into a life of piracy, the Rover conducts his private war of independence in a story that equates the free and daring life with the American dream of self-reliance and liberty from British rule. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Two Admirals: A Tale
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher: Wentworth Press
ISBN: 9780530504070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476
Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Publisher: Wentworth Press
ISBN: 9780530504070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476
Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 2 (LOA #27)
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598532235
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1106
Book Description
When Cooper's most memorable hero, Leatherstocking, started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset in The Pioneers, one early reader said of his departure, "I longed to go with him." American readers couldn't get enough of the Leatherstocking saga (collected in two Library of America volumes) and, fourteen years after he portrayed the death of Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1841). During the Seven Years War, just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, Natty brings the daughter of a British sergeant to her father's station on the Great Lakes, where the French and their Indian allies are plotting a treacherous ambush. Here, for the first time, he falls in love with a woman, before Cooper manages bring off Leatherstocking's most poignant, and perhaps his most revealing, escape. The Deerslayer (1842) brings the saga full circle and follows the young Natty on his first warpath. Instinctively gifted in the arts of the forest, pious in his respect for the unspoiled wilderness on which he loves to gaze, honorable to friend and foe alike, stoic under torture, and cool under fire, the young Leatherstocking emerges as Cooper's noblest figure of the American frontier. Enacting a rite of passage both for its hero and for the culture he comes to represent, this last book in the series glows with a timelessness that readers everywhere will find enchanting. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598532235
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1106
Book Description
When Cooper's most memorable hero, Leatherstocking, started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset in The Pioneers, one early reader said of his departure, "I longed to go with him." American readers couldn't get enough of the Leatherstocking saga (collected in two Library of America volumes) and, fourteen years after he portrayed the death of Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1841). During the Seven Years War, just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, Natty brings the daughter of a British sergeant to her father's station on the Great Lakes, where the French and their Indian allies are plotting a treacherous ambush. Here, for the first time, he falls in love with a woman, before Cooper manages bring off Leatherstocking's most poignant, and perhaps his most revealing, escape. The Deerslayer (1842) brings the saga full circle and follows the young Natty on his first warpath. Instinctively gifted in the arts of the forest, pious in his respect for the unspoiled wilderness on which he loves to gaze, honorable to friend and foe alike, stoic under torture, and cool under fire, the young Leatherstocking emerges as Cooper's noblest figure of the American frontier. Enacting a rite of passage both for its hero and for the culture he comes to represent, this last book in the series glows with a timelessness that readers everywhere will find enchanting. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Works of J. Fenimore Cooper. ...: The deerslayer (1850)
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 612
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 612
Book Description
Francis Parkman: France and England in North America Vol. 2 (LOA #12)
Author: Francis Parkman
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1660
Book Description
This is the second of two Library of America volumes (the companion volume here) presenting, in compact form, all seven parts of Francis Parkman’s monumental narrative history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Thirty years in the writing, Parkman’s “history of the American forest” is an accomplishment hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes. The story reaches its climax with the fatal confrontation of two great commanders at Quebec’s Plains of Abraham—and a daring stratagem that would determine the future of a continent. Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) details how France might have won her imperial struggle with England. Frontenac, a courtier who was made governor of New France by that most sagacious of monarchs, oversaw the colony’s brightest era of growth and influence. Had Canada’s later governors possessed his administrative skill and personal force, his sense of diplomacy and political talent, or his grasp of the uses of power in a modern world, the English colonies to the south might have become part of what Frontenac saw as a continental scheme of French dominion. England’s American colonies flourished, while France, in both the Old World and the New, declined from its greatness of the late seventeenth century. Conflict over the developing western regions of North America erupted in a series of colonial wars. As narrated by Parkman in A Half-Century of Conflict (1892), these American campaigns, while only part of a larger, global struggle, prepared the colonies for the American Revolution. In Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) Parkman describes the fatal confrontation of the two great French and English commanders whose climactic battle marked the end of French power in America. As the English colonies cooperated for their own defense, they began to realize their common interests, their relative strength, and their unique position. In this imperial war of European powers we also begin to see the American figures—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington—soon to occupy a historical stage of their own. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1660
Book Description
This is the second of two Library of America volumes (the companion volume here) presenting, in compact form, all seven parts of Francis Parkman’s monumental narrative history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Thirty years in the writing, Parkman’s “history of the American forest” is an accomplishment hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes. The story reaches its climax with the fatal confrontation of two great commanders at Quebec’s Plains of Abraham—and a daring stratagem that would determine the future of a continent. Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) details how France might have won her imperial struggle with England. Frontenac, a courtier who was made governor of New France by that most sagacious of monarchs, oversaw the colony’s brightest era of growth and influence. Had Canada’s later governors possessed his administrative skill and personal force, his sense of diplomacy and political talent, or his grasp of the uses of power in a modern world, the English colonies to the south might have become part of what Frontenac saw as a continental scheme of French dominion. England’s American colonies flourished, while France, in both the Old World and the New, declined from its greatness of the late seventeenth century. Conflict over the developing western regions of North America erupted in a series of colonial wars. As narrated by Parkman in A Half-Century of Conflict (1892), these American campaigns, while only part of a larger, global struggle, prepared the colonies for the American Revolution. In Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) Parkman describes the fatal confrontation of the two great French and English commanders whose climactic battle marked the end of French power in America. As the English colonies cooperated for their own defense, they began to realize their common interests, their relative strength, and their unique position. In this imperial war of European powers we also begin to see the American figures—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington—soon to occupy a historical stage of their own. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings Vol. 2 1859-1865 (LOA #46)
Author: Abraham Lincoln
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598531212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 844
Book Description
Abraham Lincoln was the greatest writer of the Civil War as well as its greatest political leader. His clear, beautiful, and at times uncompromisingly severe language forever shaped the nation’s understanding of its most terrible conflict. This volume, along with its companion, Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832–1858, comprises the most comprehensive selection ever published. Over 550 speeches, messages, proclamations, letters, and other writings—including the Inaugural and Gettysburg addresses and the moving condolence letter to Mrs. Bixby—record the words and deeds with which Lincoln defended, preserved, and redefined the Union.
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598531212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 844
Book Description
Abraham Lincoln was the greatest writer of the Civil War as well as its greatest political leader. His clear, beautiful, and at times uncompromisingly severe language forever shaped the nation’s understanding of its most terrible conflict. This volume, along with its companion, Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832–1858, comprises the most comprehensive selection ever published. Over 550 speeches, messages, proclamations, letters, and other writings—including the Inaugural and Gettysburg addresses and the moving condolence letter to Mrs. Bixby—record the words and deeds with which Lincoln defended, preserved, and redefined the Union.
Summertime Reading List: 180 Books You Need to Read (Vol.II)
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 20097
Book Description
This summer, during these strange strange times, immerse yourself in words that have touched all of us and will always get to the core of all of us, of every single person. Books that have made us think, change, relate, cry and laugh:_x000D_ Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)_x000D_ A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)_x000D_ A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)_x000D_ Dubliners (James Joyce)_x000D_ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)_x000D_ War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)_x000D_ Howards End (E. M. Forster)_x000D_ Le Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac)_x000D_ Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)_x000D_ Anne of Green Gables Series (L. M. Montgomery)_x000D_ The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)_x000D_ Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore)_x000D_ Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith)_x000D_ The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald)_x000D_ Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe)_x000D_ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)_x000D_ Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)_x000D_ The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)_x000D_ Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie)_x000D_ The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)_x000D_ Iliad & Odyssey (Homer)_x000D_ Kama Sutra_x000D_ Dona Perfecta (Benito Pérez Galdós)_x000D_ The Divine Comedy (Dante)_x000D_ The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells)_x000D_ The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura)_x000D_ Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)_x000D_ The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)_x000D_ Red and the Black (Stendhal)_x000D_ Rob Roy (Walter Scott)_x000D_ Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope)_x000D_ Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)_x000D_ Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)_x000D_ Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne)_x000D_ Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)_x000D_ My Antonia (Willa Cather)_x000D_ The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)_x000D_ The Awakening (Kate Chopin)_x000D_ Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)_x000D_ The Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace)_x000D_ Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)_x000D_ The Portrait of a Lady (Henry Jame...
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 20097
Book Description
This summer, during these strange strange times, immerse yourself in words that have touched all of us and will always get to the core of all of us, of every single person. Books that have made us think, change, relate, cry and laugh:_x000D_ Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)_x000D_ A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)_x000D_ A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)_x000D_ Dubliners (James Joyce)_x000D_ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)_x000D_ War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)_x000D_ Howards End (E. M. Forster)_x000D_ Le Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac)_x000D_ Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)_x000D_ Anne of Green Gables Series (L. M. Montgomery)_x000D_ The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)_x000D_ Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore)_x000D_ Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith)_x000D_ The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald)_x000D_ Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe)_x000D_ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)_x000D_ Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)_x000D_ The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)_x000D_ Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie)_x000D_ The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)_x000D_ Iliad & Odyssey (Homer)_x000D_ Kama Sutra_x000D_ Dona Perfecta (Benito Pérez Galdós)_x000D_ The Divine Comedy (Dante)_x000D_ The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells)_x000D_ The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura)_x000D_ Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)_x000D_ The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)_x000D_ Red and the Black (Stendhal)_x000D_ Rob Roy (Walter Scott)_x000D_ Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope)_x000D_ Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)_x000D_ Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)_x000D_ Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne)_x000D_ Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)_x000D_ My Antonia (Willa Cather)_x000D_ The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)_x000D_ The Awakening (Kate Chopin)_x000D_ Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)_x000D_ The Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace)_x000D_ Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)_x000D_ The Portrait of a Lady (Henry Jame...
Jack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7)
Author: Jack London
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450066
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1238
Book Description
By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London’s own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled “Revolution.” London’s prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined “the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.” Whether he is recollecting, in The Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir John Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it. Though he is outraged in The People of the Abyss by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, The Call of the Wild (in the companion volume, Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London’s warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450066
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1238
Book Description
By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London’s own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled “Revolution.” London’s prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined “the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.” Whether he is recollecting, in The Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir John Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it. Though he is outraged in The People of the Abyss by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, The Call of the Wild (in the companion volume, Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London’s warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5)
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450073
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1190
Book Description
This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, together in one volume for the first time. Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450073
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1190
Book Description
This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, together in one volume for the first time. Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.