These "sketches" comprise commentary that has appeared in various publications, including "Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Collier's," and "Trotter and Pacer," throughout Lardner's illustrious career.

The introduction to this volume charts the fortunes of The Great Gatsby from its mixed reception and disappointing sales on publication in 1925, through its increasing popularity in the 1940s, to its critical and popular elevation from the standing of an important 'period piece' to that of an undisputed classic of American literature. Of the five essays that follow, one traces this revival in greater detail, and another sets the book in the context of the perennial quest for the 'great American novel'. Two other essays examine the central from the perspective of a practising contemporary...

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald intended. The first edition was marred by errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive rewriting in proof and the conditions under which the book was produced; moreover, the subsequent transmission of the text introduced proliferating departures from the author's words. This critical edition draws on the...

Twice during the last decade of his life, in 1934 and 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald proposed a collection of his personal essays to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner's Sons. Perkins was unenthusiastic on both occasions, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 without having put his best essays between hard covers. Fortunately Fitzgerald left behind a table of contents, and with this list as a guide it has been possible to publish here the collection that he envisioned, under the title My Lost City. This volume also includes several of Fitzgerald's autobiographical writings. My Lost City, like...

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the Jazz Age, based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. In this definitive text, This Side of Paradise captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's youth and offers a poignant portrait...

A collection of short stories and other miscellaneous writings by Joseph Heller, one of America's most influential and idiosyncratic writers.

Years before the publication of Catch-22--which was called "a monumental artifact of contemporary literature" by The New York Times, "an apocalyptic masterpiece" by the Chicago Sun-Times, and "one of the most bitterly funny works in the language" by The New Republic--Joseph Heller began sharpening his skills as a writer, searching for the voice that would best express his own peculiarly wry view of the world.

In...

Since the publication in 1964 of his novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, which arguably achieved the status of a cult classic, Hubert Selby, Jr., has held a place as one of the foremost exponents of American underground literature. His work has yet to receive extensive critical attention, in part because of its deliberately shocking subject matter and its resistance to precise classification. In Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr., James R. Giles examines the writer's four novels and one collection of short stories to make the case that the full complexity of his fiction has not previously been...

Understanding Alan Sillitoe offers a lucid appraisal of the life and works of the well-known contemporary British writer hailed by critics as the literary descendent of D.H. Lawrence. Known primarily for his novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Sillitoe has written more than 50 books over the last 40 years, including novels, plays, collections of short stories, poems, and travel pieces, as well as more than four hundred essays. In this comprehensive study of the major novels and short stories, Hanson reveals Sillitoe's artistic influences...

Manners, mystery, and maniacs in O'Connor's unforgettable fiction

Describing Flannery O'Connor's fiction as "violent, grotesque, and horribly funny, with a twist", Margaret Earley Whitt explores the canon of the Georgia writer whose work has long haunted and harassed its readers. In a comprehensive survey that encompasses O'Connor's short stories, novels, essays, and letters, as well as the body of criticism that has proliferated since her death in 1964, Whitt illumines the religious themes and bizarre characters that make O'Connor's prose so strikingly different from that of other American...

In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Maxwell Perkins about a young American expatriate in Paris, an unknown writer with a brilliant future. When Perkins wrote to Ernest Hemingway several months later, he began a correspondence spanning more than two decades and charting the career of one of the most influential American authors of this century. The letters collected here are the record of that professional alliance and of Hemingway's development as a writer.