"Observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Lionel Trilling have found the United States wanting in what it takes to produce a novelist of manners - namely, a rich enough past and sufficiently stratified classes. In a work that recovers the broader meaning of "manners" for past generations, Susan Goodman demonstrates that American writers have consistently tied the subject of national identity to the norms and behaviors of everyday life - that, in fact,...

A record of Atlantic Monthly authors reads like a Who's Who of American literature. The magazine's stable of contributors included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Henry James, Robert Frost, and many others. This book captures the emerging culture of arts, ideas, science, and literature in America in its adolescence, as filtered through the intersecting lives and words of the...

"A groundbreaking examination of the artist's work during the wartime. Marc Chagall (1887-1985), one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century, created his unique style by blending richly colored folk art with Cubism, Surrealism, and imagery drawn from the Russian Christian icon tradition. This book explores a significant but neglected period in the artist's career, from the rise of fascism in the 1930s through the end of World War II, which...

In June 1923, Edith Wharton, who had not set foot on native soil since before the First World War, came home to accept an honorary degree from Yale University. In April 1995, friends of Wharton again convened at Yale. The essays collected in "A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton" represent a portion of the ocmplex and varied scholarly work delivered at that conference. -- From publisher's description.