When Henry David Thoreau launched his experiment in living at Walden Pond, he began by walking beyond the narrow limits of his neighbors, simply by putting himself at a mile remove from Concord's bourgeois epicenter -- and a thousand-mile remove from stasis, complacency, and conformity. Kevin Dann emulates and extends Thoreau's experiment in radical self-education. Alternating between personal anecdotes from his spring 2017 walking pilgrimage and...

Using the text from Shakespeare's ten "Italian Plays," the author determined the exact locations of nearly every scene, recording them in a work that's a combination literary detective story and travelogue.

The author looks past the myth to analyze the development of McMurtry as one of the leading novelists on today's American literary scene.

Emily Dickinson was a keen observer of the natural world, but less well known is the fact that she was also an avid gardener--sending fresh bouquets to friends, including pressed flowers in her letters, and studying botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke. At her family home, she tended both a small glass conservatory and a flower garden. In Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life, award-winning author Marta McDowell explores Dickinson's deep passion...

Shortly after the third edition ofLeaves of Grasswas published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have tended to read this silence as evidence of Whitman's indifference to the Civil War during its critical early months. In this penetrating, original, and beautifully written book, Ted Genoways reconstructs those...

"A visionary exploration of the life and times of Joseph Conrad, his turbulent age of globalization and our own, from one of the most exciting young historians writing today. Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: these forces shaped Joseph Conrad's destiny at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature,...

Can religious belief survive in a scientific era? Will the desire for the transcendent outlast postmodern nihilism? Aldous Huxley thought so. One of the first writers to grasp the profound significance of the new physics, Huxley invoked science more often than any other artist of his generation. He also sought a religion compatible with the new scientific picture. Today his synthesis of mysticism and science is being played out in high and popular...

Includes material on the public sculpture, Indian mounds, folk architecture, Greek revival buildings, Gothic revival buildings, postbellum Victorian architecture, and modernist architecture of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.