American history abounds with a rich tradition of literature dealing with nonviolence. In a work that spans from the seventeenth century to the present, Michael True brings to light the strong but long-neglected strain in American culture: nonviolence as an active response to conflicts and divisiveness. In identifying writings about action for social change, he distinguishes literary works from peace advocacy and nonviolence and relates them to broad currents of United States history. The Quakers of the 1680s and abolitionists of the 1850s, the sanctuary Movement and Plowshares of the 1980s, novelists (from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer) and poets (from Walt Whitman to Denise Levertov) all have written powerful works on nonviolent action. Through this literature, the author explores the beauty of an important theme in American literature. At a time when people face widespread injustice, True reminds us that nonviolence holds a significant place in our country's history.

A powerful collection of essential American antiwar writings, from the Revolution to the war on terror—featuring over 150 eloquent, provocative voices for peace Library of America presents an unprecedented tribute to a great American literary tradition. War has been a reality of the American experience from the founding of the nation and in every generation there have been dedicated and passionate visionaries who have responded to this reality with vital calls for peace. Spanning from the American Revolution to the war on terror, War No More gathers the essential texts of this uniquely American antiwar tradition in one volume for the first time. Classic expressions of conscience like Thoreau’s seminal “Civil Disobedience” lay the groundwork for such influential modern theorists of nonviolence as David Dellinger, Thomas Merton, and Barbara Deming. The long arc of the American antiwar movement is vividly traced in the urgent appeals of activists, made in soaring oratory and galvanizing song, and in dramatic dispatches from the front lines of antiwar protests. The voices of veterans, from the Civil War to the Iraq War, are prominently represented, as is the firsthand testimony of conscientious objectors. Contemporary writers—including Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Schell, Nicholson Baker, and Jane Hirshfield—demonstrate the ongoing richness of this literature in the years since September 11, 2001. Featuring more than 150 eloquent and provocative writers in all, War No More is a bible for activists, a go-to resource for scholars and students, and an inspiring and fascinating story for every reader interested in the crosscurrents of war and peace in American history. 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.

That Denise Levertov (1923–97) was one of the most pioneering and skilled poets of her generation is beyond dispute. Her masterly use of language, innovative experimentations with organic form, and the political acuity disclosed by her activist poetry are well marked by critical communities. But it is also quite clear that the poems Levertov wrote in the last twenty years of her life, with their more explicit focus on theological themes and subjects, are among the best poems written on religious experience of any century, let alone the twentieth. The collection of essays gathered here shed vital light on this neglected aspect of Levertov studies so as to expand and enrich the scope of critical engagement. In a mixture of theoretical considerations and close readings, these essays provide valuable reflections about the complex relationship between poetry and belief and offer philosophically robust insights into different styles of poetic imagination. The abiding hope is to broaden the terrain for discussions in twenty-first-century theology, literary theory, poetics, and aesthetics—honoring immanence, exploring transcendence, and dwelling with integrity within the spaces between.

How have Americans sought peaceful, rather than destructive, solutions to domestic and world conflict? This two-volume set documents peace and antiwar movements in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Although national leaders often claim to be fighting to achieve peace, the real peace seekers struggle against enormous resistance to their message and have often faced persecution for their efforts. Despite a well-established pattern of being involved in wars, the United States also has a long tradition of citizens who made extensive efforts to build and maintain peaceful societies and prevent the destructive human and material costs of war. Unarmed activists have most consistently upheld American values at home. Opposition to War: An Encyclopedia of U.S. Peace and Antiwar Movements investigates this historical tradition of resistance to involvement in armed conflict—an especially important and relevant topic today as the nation has been mired in numerous military conflicts throughout most of the current century. The book examines a largely misunderstood and underappreciated minority of Americans who have committed themselves to finding peaceful resolutions to domestic and international conflicts—individuals who have proposed and conducted an array of practical and creative methods for peaceful change, from the transformation of individual behavior to the development of international governing and legal systems, for more than 250 years. Readers will learn how individuals working alone or organized into societies of various size have steadfastly campaigned to stop war, end the arms race, eliminate the underlying causes of war, and defend the civil liberties of Americans when wartime nationalism most threatens them.

Tillie Olsen's fiction and nonfiction portray, with all their harsh contours, the lives of people who cannot speak for themselves or whose words have been forgotten or ignored. Olsen's writing is neither serene nor despairing. In this sensitive thematic reading, Mara Faulkner shows that its most subversive function is the assertion that human life can be other than and more than it is. Olsen's promise of full creative life aims to make her readers forever dissatisfied with physical, emotional, and intellectual starvation. Faulkner finds in Olsen's writing a triple-layered pattern combining protest against oppression (blight), celebration of courage and strength (fruit), and the heartening dream of a radically transformed future world (possibility). She focuses on four of Olsen's main themes - motherhood, the relationship between men and women, community, and language - and shows how, because of social and economic circumstances, potentially creative tensions become destructive contradictions: motherhood stifles women's lives, patriarchy and poverty turn men into enemies of women and children, communities force their members into betrayal, and language distorts or erases human experience. Olsen reveals, according to Faulkner, the overlapping oppressions of class, race, gender, nationality, education, and age that both link people and set them apart. Yet, she refuses to exalt suffering and deprivation. In this comprehensive examination of a literature of social consciousness, Faulkner approaches Olsen's works within their historical, social, and political contexts without treating them as propaganda. In fact, she shows that it is Olsen's compressed, poetic style that gives her writing itsrevolutionary power. She illuminates both the author's individual talent and the traditions in which her works were created - traditions of women writers of color, writers of the working class, and writers who were immigrants or children of immigrants.

Traveling to Vietnam is the first book to document the little-known activities of the American peace activists who traveled to Vietnam to meet with officials in Hanoi, and with the National Liberation Front. What began as an effort to provide information about the war to the American public encouraged travelers to organize mail deliveries between American prisoners of war in Hanoi and their families at home. Activists included Mary Clarke of Women Strike for Peace, Staughton Lynd, former director of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom schools, Dr. George Perera of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons ( who researched the effects of defoliants that Americans used during the war), Elizabeth Boardman of A Quaker Action Group, Joseph Elder of the American Friends Service Committee, and actress Jane Fonda. Although Washington officials opposed their endeavors, seized their passports and bank accounts, and usually refused to issue licenses for medical equipment and supplies, the activists continued their efforts. By 1967, they averaged one delegation trip a month to Hanoi. They continued to bring back news from North Vietnam and won the release of some American pilots.

Whether Thersites in Homer’s Iliad, Wilfred Owen in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” or Allen Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium “Poetry and the American Voice” in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful. Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet’s relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation. In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

Denise Levertov's Selected Poems delivers in a single accessible volume "one of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash).

Richard M. Nixon remains an enigma even thirty years after his resignation. Of the many portraits of this complex man, none have been more intimate or revealing than this memoir from his personal physician, friend, and confidante of more than forty years, John C. Lungren, M.D. Dr. Lungren, with his son and co-author John C. Lungren Jr., portrays Nixon as a paradoxical man—intense, compassionate, guarded, intelligent, resilient, deeply religious, enormously successful but ultimately tragic. Lungren describes his battle to restore the president's health after his resignation and reveals previously unknown details about Nixon's two intensive hospitalizations, his near fatal vascular collapse, and his depression. Lungren experienced firsthand Nixon's thoughts and feelings during the public scrutiny of federal prosecution for his role in the Watergate break-in. Accused of shielding his friend, Lungren himself came under fire; his private office was even burgled in an apparent attempt to copy Nixon's private medical records. Using previously unpublished sources, original correspondence, and private photographs, Healing Richard Nixon places Nixon in a new light. No future research or conclusions about Nixon—the man or the president—will be complete without consulting this fascinating memoir.