Herman Melville's masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history Over a century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in...
Herman Melville's masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history Over a century and a half after its publication...
If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian's perspective and a critic's insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates thatMelville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded -- in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan -- an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby...
If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian's perspective and a critic's i...
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time "Theodore Dreiser is a man who, with the passage of time, is bound to loom larger and larger in the awakening aesthetic consciousness of America. Among all of our prose writers he is one of the few men of whom it may be said that he has . . . never been a trickster. If there is a modern movement in American prose writing, a movement toward greater courage and fidelity to life in writing, Theodore Dreiser is the pioneer and the hero of the movement."--Sherwood Anderson Long before she was seduced by the...
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time "Theodore Dreiser is a man who, with the passage of time, is bound...
Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville's words, "the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart," how have we Americans made do? In The Real American Dream one of the nation's premier literary scholars searches out the symbols and stories by which Americans have reached for something beyond worldly desire. A spiritual history ranging from the first English settlements to the present day, the book is also a lively, deeply learned meditation on hope.
Andrew Delbanco tells of the stringent God of Protestant Christianity, who exerted immense force over the...
Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville's words, "the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart," how have we Americans made do? ...
The whole destiny of America is contained in the first Puritans who landed on these shores, wrote de Tocqueville. These newcomers, and the range of their intellectual achievements and failures, are vividly depicted in The Puritans in America. Exiled from England, the Puritans settled in what Cromwell called "a poor, cold, and useless" place--where they created a body of ideas and aspirations that were essential in the shaping of American religion, politics, and culture.
In a felicitous blend of documents and narrative Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco recapture the sweep and...
The whole destiny of America is contained in the first Puritans who landed on these shores, wrote de Tocqueville. These newcomers, and the range of...
"At first reading, Representative Men seems the most alien of Emerson's books. First published in 1850 (having taken form over the five preceding years as a series of lectures intended as 'winter evening entertainments'), it was inspired by the romantic belief that there exists a 'general mind' that expresses itself with special intensity through certain individual lives. It was an appreciation of genius as a quality distributed to the few for the benefit of the many. When, according to Longfellow, Emerson began to speak on these themes in Boston in 1845, the Odeon theater was...
"At first reading, Representative Men seems the most alien of Emerson's books. First published in 1850 (having taken form over the five prec...
This book is about the experience of becoming American in the seventeenth century. It has in some respects the appearance of a study in intellectual history, but I prefer to think of it as a contribution to the history of what the Puritans called affections. My hope is to help advance our understanding not of ideas so much as of feeling-specifically of the affective life of some of the men and women who emigrated to New England more than three hundred fifty years ago, but also of the persistent sense of renewal and risk that has attended the project of becoming American ever since.
This book is about the experience of becoming American in the seventeenth century. It has in some respects the appearance of a study in intellectual h...
Celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth with this new edition of his greatest speeches and writings Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that has all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. Lincoln's writings are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. The Portable Abraham Lincoln contains the great public speeches - the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address - along...
Celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth with this new edition of his greatest speeches and writings Abraham Lincoln endow...
The abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century have long been painted in extremes--vilified as reckless zealots who provoked the catastrophic bloodletting of the Civil War, or praised as daring and courageous reformers who hastened the end of slavery. But Andrew Delbanco sees abolitionists in a different light, as the embodiment of a driving force in American history: the recurrent impulse of an adamant minority to rid the world of outrageous evil.
Delbanco imparts to the reader a sense of what it meant to be a thoughtful citizen in nineteenth-century America, appalled by slavery...
The abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century have long been painted in extremes--vilified as reckless zealots who provoked the catastrophic bloo...
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun mingles fable with fact in a mysterious tale of American artists liberated from New England mores in Rome. In his introduction, Andrew Delbanco remarks that Hawthorne's novel is ultimately less about freedom than its costs. It is a book "that invites us to observe people in the grip of guilt, passion, or a naive faith in God or art, and to watch them seek escape from their fears and doubts as their creed--whatever it is--fails them." The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Marble Faun in The Centenary...
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun mingles fable with fact in a mysterious tale of American artists liberated from New England mores in R...
