From the self-withdrawn Fanshawe through the posthumously issued Dr. Grimshaw's Secret, this compilation of reviews and notices traces Nathaniel Hawthorne's rise from obscurity to world renown as a writer placed in the ranks of Carlyle, Dickens, and Shakespeare. Reviews by Henry Fothergill Chorley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Edwin Whipple, Henry James, Edith Simcox, William Dean Howells, and many others respond to Hawthorne's tales, romances, notebooks, and fragmentary works in efforts to capture and define the...

This volume, a significant contribution to the reception history of Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and other works, reproduces the full range of the contemporary reviews of Whitman's various books. Brash and iconoclastic, revered and reviled at various times, Whitman came in for an astonishing array of commentary ranging from sympathy to hostility. Reviews by William Dean Howells, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and (writing anonymously) Whitman himself, and a host of other writers clarify much about both the poet and nineteenth-century American culture.

The American Critical Archives is a series of reference books that provide representative selections of contemporary reviews of the main works of major American authors. Specifically, each volume contains both full reviews and excerpts from reviews that appeared in newspapers and weekly and monthly periodicals, generally within a few months of the publication of the work concerned. There is an introductory historical overview by the volume editor, as well as checklists of additional reviews located but not quoted. This volume offers a broad sampling of the immediate reaction to the appearance...

American Critical Archives is a series of reference books that provide representative selections of contemporary reviews of the main works of major American authors. Providing reprints of over 760 reviews and checklists of nearly 950 others, this book represents the first comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of the writing of Langston Hughes from 1926 until his death in 1967. Celebrated as a young poet of the Harlem Renaissance, his poetry appeared in The Crisis and The New Negro. His other works include the play The Mulatto, and poetry collected in Shakespeare of Harlem and Ask...

This book represents the first comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Many of the reviews are reprinted from hard-to-locate contemporary newspapers and periodicals.

This volume is the first to collect the critical responses of Steinbeck's generation to his many fiction and nonfiction works, as they appeared from the late 1920s on. The articles trace the record of Steinbeck's progress through the 1930s and go on to reflect his steady series of achievements through the 1960s, including his attainment of the Nobel Prize in 1967. These articles offer at last a means of seeing Steinbeck's writings as they were perceived by his contemporaries, whose task it was first to evaluate and interpret them for an ever-growing readership.

Jewel Spears Brooker presents the most comprehensive gathering of newspaper and magazine reviews of Eliot's work ever assembled. Including reviews from both American and British journals, Brooker expands on major themes within the reviews to demonstrate how they influenced not only Eliot, but also literary history in the twentieth century. Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot was also extremely prolific. This volume is a testament to both aspects of his work.

Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews presents the most thorough gathering of newspaper and magazine reviews of James' work ever assembled. This collection also reprints many rarely seen notices written by the most important women reviewers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter ends with a checklist of additional reviews not presented here. The introduction surveys the major themes of the reviews and also shows how they personally influenced James and his work.

Louisa May Alcott was very popular and respected as the author of novels, sensational tales, travel writing and temperance tracts. In addition to providing a wealth of new information for scholars interested in the writer, this considerable collection of nineteenth-century reviews also reveals more about the ways in which reading audiences were constructed in the nineteenth-century U.S. The reviews provide a window into nineteenth-century attitudes toward popular fiction and women writers as well.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty's writing and photography were the subject of more than one thousand reviews, of which over two hundred are collected here. From the first, reviewers loved Welty's language and disparaged her lack of plot. Their eager anticipation for the next book is rarely diminished by the shock of reading entirely different styles of writing. Her work was admired even as it challenged its readers. The reviews selected for reprinting here represent the diversity of Welty's reception and assessment. Reviews from small towns, urban centers, noted fiction writers,...