R. W. B. Lewis

A Family Narrative

The Jameses

Richard W. Lewis

Leicester Crosby Lewis

Analyzes the contributions of such figures as Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, and Parker toward the creation of a native American mythology.

The American Adam

Ruth Lord

The story of Henry du Pont and the museum of Americana he envisioned.

A Daughter's Portrait

Henry F. Du Pont and Winterthur

Robert Penn Warren

Cleanth Brooks

Lewis P. Simpson

James A. Grimshaw, Jr., brings together for the first time more than 350 letters exchanged by two scholars who altered the way literature is taught in this country. The selected letters focus on the development of their five major textbooks--the rationale for selections, the details involved in obtaining permissions and preparing indexes, and the demands of meeting deadlines. More important, these letters reveal their attitudes toward literature, teaching, and scholarship. Providing insight into two of the most influential literary minds of this century, these letters show two men who were deeply involved in research and writing, and who were committed to a life of travel, conversation, and learning. Their zest for life and their love of literature explain, in part, their uncanny ability to persevere and to succeed. Yet their human qualities are also present in the letters, which bring Brooks and Warren to life as rare individuals able to sustain a deep, lifelong friendship. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren will help readers better understand the critical work of Brooks and the creative work of Warren. Students and teachers of American literature will find this book indispensable.

A Literary Correspondence

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren

Richard H. Lawson

Lawson Richard

Richard Grenville Lawson

This an American writer".--The New York Times Book Review.

Edith Wharton

A biography of the great medieval Italian poet and historian examines his life from his youth in Florence to his creation of "The Divine Comedy," his masterful allegorical poem of redemption and self-discovery.

A Life

Dante

An insightful biography of Florence?s famous son Acclaimed biog rap her R.W.B. Lewis traces the life and complex development? emotional, artistic, philosophical?of this supreme poet-historian. Here we meet the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with love and death, the grand master of dramatic narrative and allegory, and his monumental search for ultimate truth in The Divine Comedy. It is in this masterpiece of self-discovery and redemption that Lewis finds Dante?s own autobiography?and the sum of all his shifting passions and epiphanies.

Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"—dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's "new man," the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

R. W. B. Lewis

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