An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive-yet accessible-analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America's golden age-from 1890 to 1940-included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle for realism served as the basis for Kazin's interpretation. Kazin's debut was impressive in its scope for such...

Writings are selected from among the winners of the previous year's National Magazine Awards, presented by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

All autobiographers are unreliable narrators. Yet what a writer chooses to misrepresent is as telling -- perhaps even more so -- as what really happened. Timothy Adams believes that autobiography is an attempt to reconcile one's life with one's self, and he argues in this book that autobiography should not be taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic. Adams focuses on five modern American writers whose autobiographies are particularly...

A collection of essays, fiction, devotional works, and other writings by Quaker authors from the second half of the 20th century.

"Extraordinary stories of crime, passion, and adventure from The Atavist magazine, the trailblazing leader in longform narrative writing. Since its founding in 2011, The Atavist has garnered an unprecedented eight National Magazine Award nominations and was the first all-digital publication to win in feature writing. This collection presents the finest examples of a new kind of nonfiction storytelling as practiced by a young generation of longform...

At the height of the Jazz Age, Ring Lardner was Americas most beloved humorist, equally admired by a popular audience and by literary friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. A sports writer who became a sensation with his comic baseball bestseller, "You Know Me Al," Lardner had a rare gift for inspired nonsense and an ear attuned to the rhythms and hilarious oddities of American speech. He was also a sharp and dispassionate observer of...