Known as "The Myth of Amherst" for her withdrawal from society while still a young woman, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) had an inner life that was deeply emotional and intense. She knew rapture and despair, pondered the wonder of God and the meaning of death. She broke tradition and was criticized for her seminal experiments with unorthodox phrasing, rhyme and broken meter, within concise verse forms, thus becoming an innovator and forerunner of modern poets.

This collection of Emily Dickinson's poems is interspersed with her luminous and fascinating letters, all read by Julie Harris,...

Letters of E. B. White touches on a wide variety of subjects, including the New Yorker editor who became the author's wife; their dachshund, Fred, with his "look of fake respectability"; and White's contemporaries, from Harold Ross and James Thurber to Groucho Marx and John Updike and, later, Senator Edmund S. Muskie and Garrison Keillor. Updated with newly released letters from 1976 to 1985, additional photographs, and a new foreword by John Updike, this unparalleled collection of letters from one of America's favorite essayists, poets, and storytellers now spans nearly...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?seen variously as a child prodigy, musical genius, tragic Romantic artist, and cultural icon?is among the most written-about of all composers. This fascinating set of his letters offers a new understanding of his life story?his marriage, compositions, performances, occasional money worries, opinions of fellow musicians, and complex relationship with his father?and a revealing portrait of both the man and the musician.

Before coming to national attention for his novel "Sister Carrie, " Theodore Dreiser worked for nearly a decade as a magazine editor and freelance writer. Now in paperback, "Art, Music, and Literature, 1897-1902" collects a rich selection of Dreiser's brief, colorful articles and interviews with American artists, musicians, and writers during this period. His profiles and interviews include such notables as Alfred Stieglitz, William Dean Howells, and legendary impresario Major James Burton Pond, as well as...

Carl Sandburg first encountered Kenneth Dodson through a letter written at sea during World War II. Though Dodson wrote the letter to his wife, Letha, Sandburg read it in tears and told her, "I've got to meet this man." Composed primarily of their correspondence that continued until Sandburg's death in 1967, "The Poet and the Sailor" is a chronicle of the deep friendship that followed. Ranging over anything they found important, from writing to health and humor, the letters are arranged by Richard Dodson and are...

This last known work of noted historian Bell Irvin Wiley reveals the private mind of John White Geary, a Union general from Pennsylvania, through his Civil War letters to his wife, Mary. Wiley had selected these roughly 200 letters for publication, but the unfinished manuscript lay undiscovered for twelve years after the historian's death. The letters provide a rare glimpse of the two main theaters of war through the eyes of a general officer. Geary saw action at Cedar Mountain and Gettysburg in the Virginia theater and in the major campaigns in the west--from lifting the siege at...

William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) always presented himself as the third Rossetti: a civil servant and critic unworthy to be compared with his brother, Dante Gabriel, and his sister, Christina. Not everyone has readily accepted Rossetti's evaluation of himself. The painter William Rothenstein remembered him as a man whose "outlook on life was broad and humane," and the only one of the Pre-Raphaelites "who was sympathetic towards the work of younger writers and painters."

More recently, Professor W. E. Fredeman has written of him as "among the P.R.B.s... almost the only man of...

June Jordan was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, to Mildred and Granville Jordan, Jamaican natives. During her life, she became one of the most prolific, important, and influential African American writers of her time. Before her death from breast cancer in 2002, Jordan published more than 27 books, including Some of Us Did Not Die, Solider: A Poet's Childhood, Poetry for the People: Finding a Voice through Verse, Haruko Love Poems, and Naming Our Destiny. Her work Civil Wars, a collection of letters and essays, addressed such topics as...

This is a complete facsimile edition of fourteen autograph letters of John Donne that are among the greatest treasures of the Folger Library. The letters, dating from February and March 1602, relate to Donne's clandestine marriage to Anne More and are addressed to his father-in-law, Sir George More, and to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper, who was also Donne's employer.

The text of a letter provides one part of the story, while its very tangibility -- the ancient folds, the grime and fingerprints deposited by the writer, deliverer, and readers, the broken seals, the ink blots, the...