The Call of the Wild--Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
To this day Jack London is the most widely read American writer in the world," E. L. Doctorow wrote in The New York Times Book Review. Generally considered to be London's greatest achievement, The Call of the Wild brought him international acclaim when it was published in 1903. His story of the dog Buck, who learns to survive in the bleak Yukon wilderness, is viewed by many as his symbolic autobiography. "No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find...

Presents a collection of stories selected from magazines in the United States and Canada.

With his U.S.A. trilogy, comprising THE 42nd PARALLEL, 1919, and THE BIG MONEY, John Dos Passos is said by many to have written the great American novel. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultivating what Edmund Wilson once called their own little corners, John Dos Passos was taking on the world

With 1919, the second volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos continues his vigorous and sweeping panorama of twentieth-century America (Forum), lauded on publication of the first volume not only for its scope, but also for its groundbreaking style. Again, employing a host of experimental de

THE BIG MONEY completes John Dos Passos's three-volume fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline (American Heritage) and marks the end of one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken (Time). Here we come back to America after the war and find

"The writer," according to Emerson, "believes all that can be thought can be written...In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported." And what writer worth his name, E. L. Doctorow asks, will not seriously, however furtively, take on the universe? Human consciousness, personal history, American literature, religion, and politics--these are the far-flung coordinates of the universe that Doctorow reports here, a universe that uniquely and brilliantly reflects our contemporary scene.

Even theAmerican Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that F. Scott Fitzgerald epitomized the Jazz Age. And nowhere among his writings are the gin, pith, and morning-after squint of that era better illuminated than in these short essays. Selected in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth, these candid personal memoirs one written with his wife, Zelda furnish nothing less than the autobiography of "the lost generation" of the 1920s. "He lacked armor," EL. Doctorow, author of The Waterworks, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgates, notes in his introduction. He did not live in protective...

One of America's premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and World's Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live.
Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick townhouse in rural Illinois ("A House on the Plains"), working things out with a...

E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Now here are Doctorow's rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms: from the literary (Melville and Mark Twain) to the comic (Harpo Marx) to the cosmic (Genesis and Einstein). As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the idea that "we know by what we create."
Just what is Melville doing in Moby-Dick? And how did The...