Henri Charriere, nicknamed "Papillon," for the butterfly tattoo on his chest, was convicted in Paris in 1931 of a murder he did not commit. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, he became obsessed with one goal: escape. After planning and executing a series of treacherous yet failed attempts over many years, he was eventually sent to the notorious prison, Devil's Island, a place from which no one had ever escaped . . . until Papillon. His flight to freedom remains one of the most incredible feats of human cunning, will, and endurance ever...

The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary -classics- appeared--works -original- enough to mark a beginning for America's literary history. But the American Renaissance, Donald Pease argues in his introduction, does not belong to the nation's secular history so much as it denotes a rebirth from it: -Independent of the time kept by secular history, the American Renaissance keeps what we could call global Renaissance time--the sacred time a nation claims to renew, when it claims its cultural place as a great nation existing within a...