Profiles the works of Tennessee Williams and provides information on his life and writing career.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Perfect for students of English Literature, Theatre Studies and American Studies at college and university, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams provides a lucid and stimulating analysis of Willams' dramatic work by one of America's leading scholars. With the centennial of his birth celebrated amid a flurry of conferences devoted to his work in 2011, and his plays a central part of any literature and drama curriculum and uibiquitous in theatre repertoires, he remains a giant of twentieth century literature and drama. In Brenda Murphy's major study of his work she examines his life and career and provides an analysis of more than a score of his key plays, including in-depth studies of major works such as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and others. She traces the artist figure who features in many of Williams' plays to broaden the discussion beyond the normal reference points. As with other volumes in Methuen Drama's Critical Companions series, this book features too essays by Bruce McConachie, John S. Bak, Felicia Hardison Londré and Annette Saddik, offering perspectives on different aspects of Williams' work that will assist students in their own critical thinking.

Offers advice on writing essays about the works of Tennessee Williams and lists sample topics.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of Tennessee Williams in China, from rejection and/or misgivings to cautious curiosity and to full-throated acceptance, in the context of profound changes in China’s socioeconomic and cultural life and mores since the end of the Cultural Revolution. It fills a conspicuous gap in scholarship in the reception of one of the greatest American playwrights and joins book-length studies of Chinese reception of Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill, Brecht, and other important Western playwrights whose works have been eagerly embraced and appropriated and have had catalytic impact on modern Chinese cultural life.

Set between January 1862 and January 1863, this second installment in the ambitious Civil War series paints an unforgettable portrait of the year that turned a secessionist rebellion into a war of emancipation Including eleven never-before-published pieces, here are more than 140 messages, proclamations, newspaper stories, letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clara Barton, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton Strong, as well as soldiers Charles B. Haydon and Henry Livermore Abbott; diarists Kate Stone and Judith McGuire; and war correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. The selections include vivid and haunting narratives of battles-Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, the gunboat war on the Western rivers, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River-as well as firsthand accounts of life and death in the military hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impact of war on Massachusetts towns and Louisiana plantations; of the struggles of runaway slaves and the mounting fears of slaveholders; and of the deliberations of the cabinet in Washington, as Lincoln moved toward what he would call "the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century": the revolutionary proclamation of emancipation. 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.

When Cooper's most memorable hero, Leatherstocking, started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset in The Pioneers, one early reader said of his departure, "I longed to go with him." American readers couldn't get enough of the Leatherstocking saga (collected in two Library of America volumes) and, fourteen years after he portrayed the death of Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1841). During the Seven Years War, just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, Natty brings the daughter of a British sergeant to her father's station on the Great Lakes, where the French and their Indian allies are plotting a treacherous ambush. Here, for the first time, he falls in love with a woman, before Cooper manages bring off Leatherstocking's most poignant, and perhaps his most revealing, escape. The Deerslayer (1842) brings the saga full circle and follows the young Natty on his first warpath. Instinctively gifted in the arts of the forest, pious in his respect for the unspoiled wilderness on which he loves to gaze, honorable to friend and foe alike, stoic under torture, and cool under fire, the young Leatherstocking emerges as Cooper's noblest figure of the American frontier. Enacting a rite of passage both for its hero and for the culture he comes to represent, this last book in the series glows with a timelessness that readers everywhere will find enchanting. 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.

Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith was the most widely read sportswriter of the last century and the first to win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. From the 1940s to the 1980s, his nationally syndicated columns for the New York Herald Tribune and later for The New York Times traversed the world of sports with literary panache and wry humor. “I’ve always had the notion,” Smith once said, “that people go to spectator sports to have fun and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again.” Now, writer and editor (and inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball) Daniel Okrent presents the best of Smith’s inimitable columns—miniature masterpieces that remain the gold standard in sportswriting. Here are Smith’s indelible profiles of sports luminaries, which show his gift for distilling a career’s essence in a single column. Unforgettable accounts of historic occasions—Bobby Thompson’s Shot Heard ’Round the World, Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, the first Ali-Frazier fight—are joined by more offbeat stories that display Smith’s unmistakable wit, intelligence, and breadth of feeling. Here, too, are more personal glimpses into Smith’s life and work, revealed in stories about his lifelong passion for fishing and in “My Press-Box Memoirs,” a 1975 reminiscence for Esquire collected here for the first time. A Special Publication of The Library of America.

An exclusive new translation of the most perceptive and influential book ever written about American politics and society—“the bible on democracy” (The Texas Observer) Alexis de Tocqueville, a young aristocratic French lawyer, came to the United States in 1831 to study its penitentiary systems. His nine-month visit and subsequent reading and reflection resulted in this landmark masterpiece of political observation and analysis. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville vividly describes the unprecedented social equality he found in America and explores its implications for European society in the emerging modern era. His book provides enduring insight into the political consequences of widespread property ownership, the potential dangers to liberty inherent in majority rule, the vital role of religion in American life, and the importance of civil institutions in an individualistic culture dominated by the pursuit of material self-interest. He also probes the deep differences between the free and slave states, writing prophetically of racism, bigotry, and prejudice in the United States. Brought to life by Arthur Goldhammer’s clear, fluid, and vigorous translation, this volume of Democracy in America is the first to fully capture Tocqueville’s achievements both as an accomplished literary stylist and as a profound political thinker.

This comprehensive collection of writings from the War of Independence poses a “subtle but profound challenge to much that we think we know about the founders and their era” (Los Angeles Times) Drawn from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, public declarations, contemporary narratives, and private memoranda, this Library of America volume brings together over 120 pieces by more than seventy participants and eyewitnesses to create a unique literary panorama of the War of Independence. Beginning with Paul Revere’s own narrative of his legendary ride in April 1775 and ending with a moving account of George Washington’s resignation from the command of the Continental Army in December 1783, the volume contains writing that describes the major events of the conflict—the early battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill; the failed American invasion of Canada; the 1776 campaign in New York and New Jersey; the crucial battle of Saratoga; the bitter fighting in the South and along the western frontier; and the decisive triumph at Yorktown. Included are writings by famous figures—Washington Franklin, Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, John and Abigail Adams—and by lesser known participants: Samuel Blachley Webb describing courage and panic at Bunker Hill; Sarah Hodgkins writing longingly to her absent soldier husband; Jabez Fitch recounting the last hours of a wounded American officer in Brooklyn; Albigence Waldo chronicling the privations and miseries of Valley Forge; Otho Holland Williams recording with appealing candor American defeats and victories in South Carolina. The volume also contains writings by American Loyalists and by British officers and officials serving in America that provide provocative insights into the losing side of an epochal conflict. All selections are written by people who were in America at the time of the conflict. The American Revolution also includes a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory notes, and an index.

A comprehensive collection of the American humorist’s best work—including “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”—plus original drawings and a chronology of Thurber’s own troubled life James Thurber, whimsical fantasist and deadpan chronicler of everyday absurdities, brought American humor into the 20th century. His comic persona, a modern city-dweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, remains hilarious, subtly disturbing, and instantly recognizable. Here, in over 1,000 pages, editor Garrison Keillor presents the best and most extensive collection ever assembled. Pieces include “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Catbird Seat,” the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the classic My Life and Hard Times, and the best of The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World—And Welcome to It, and the other famous books. Plus 500 wonderful drawings, including The Seal in the Bedroom and celebrated sequences like “The Masculine Approach” and “The War Between Men and Women.” Rounding out the volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, a memoir of the New Yorker publisher, and a number of wonderful early pieces never collected by Thurber. Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber’s extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. 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.