F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship assembles Fitzgerald's public and private writings on his trade and craft. The 46 selections in this volume construct an autobiographical account of Fiztgerald's 20-year endeavour to maintain careers as a commercial writer and as a literary artist.

Describing W.S. Merwin as a moral poet, H.L. Hix identifies the characteristics that have set Merwin's voice apart and suggests that an underlying vision of human interconnectedness and affinity with nature permeates his poetry. Hix surveys Merwin's oeuvre to show that despite a reputation for difficulty and obscurity, his verse is clear and direct.

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.

The relationship between Thomas Wolfe and his legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, has been the subject of guesswork and anecdote for seventy years. Beginning with the 1929 publication of Look Homeward, Angel, literary scholars have debated the writer's dependence on his editor and the degree to which Perkins participated in Wolfe's work. Now, with this volume of 251 letters between Wolfe and the House of Scribner (two-thirds of which have never been published), the mythologized friendship between the author and the editor is clarified, and the record can be set straight.

Celebrated for his...

Allows today's reader to observe the development of Fitzgerald's great novel.

The standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

During the 46 years that John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978) - an influential literary figure and respected poet - worked at Charles Scribner's Sons, the company distinguished itself as the leading literary publishing house in America. During this golden era, Scribners included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Alan Paton, George Santayana and Thomas Wolfe among its authors. As the editor who assisted and then succeeded the legendary Maxwell Perkins as editor in chief, Wheelock worked with some of the nation's most acclaimed - yet difficult - authors. Wheelock's memoir of his...