"Dante traces the life and complex development - emotional, artistic, philosophical - of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, and to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later." "Lewis reveals the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with...

Traces the origins, development, and flowering of the intellectual family, from its eighteenth-century Irish origins to the death of the novelist Henry James in 1916.

In The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, has culled twenty-one of her best stories, here available in a single volume for the first time.

A Catholic priest in southern Mexico is on the run during an anti-clerical purge.

Provides plot summary, list of characters, and critical views for four Melville short stories: "Bartleby, the scrivener: a story of Wall Street," "The Encantadas" (or Enchanted isles), "Benito Cereno," and "Billy Budd, sailor."