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...

In 1992 the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new edition of Theodore Dreiser's second novel, Jennie Gerhardt. The original published text was altered significantly from the author's intentions: its sexual energy was short-circuited, its criticisms of organized religion were blunted, its language was smoothed and sentimentalized, and, most important, Jennie Gerhardt was reduced to a less thoughtful, less womanly character. The restored edition brings back the sexual charge, reinstates the social and religious criticism, and makes the language Dreiser's again. This volume...

"She was horrified, stunned, like a bird in the grasp of a cat, but somehow through it all was something terrific, inviting, urging, was speaking to her. He released her from his grasp. 'We won't do any more of this here, but you belong to me'." Jennie Gerhardt was Theodore Dreiser's second novel and his first commercial success. It is regarded as one of his three best novels, along with Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. This edition presents the text as it was originally written, restoring the novel to its complete form.

This is a selection of interviews with William Styron published during the period 1951-1984, from the months just following publication of Lie Down in Darkness, his first novel, to the period after publication of Sophie's Choice. Some twenty-five interviews are reprinted here, including six that are translated from the French and published in this country for the first time.

Styron is one of the most frequently interviewed writers of his generation. Unlike Faulkner, to whom he was often compared early in his career, Styron has learned to be a patient and cooperative interview...

The writings of William Gilmore Simms (18061870) provide a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all of its regional diversity. Simms's account of the region is more comprehensive than that of any other author of his time; he treats the major intellectual and social issues of the South and depicts the bonds and tensions among all of its inhabitants. By the mid-1840s Simms's novels were so well known that Edgar Allan Poe could call him "the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced." Perhaps the darkest of Simms's novel-length works,...

Last Kiss brings together a variety of Fitzgerald's writings from throughout his career, including drama, poems, book reviews, short stories, and journalism.