Emily Dickinson's Gardens

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foreword by Paul Bowles

O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane collects the most significant letters from one of America's most evocative modern poets into a document as passionate, revealing, and ultimately as tragic as Crane's short life. He died at the age of thirty-two. Of the 1200 letters that survive, this edition selects over three hundred that best illustrate the complexity and textures of Crane's life - from family pressures to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality. These letters served as his notebook, his diary, his workshop, and confessional. Preserving ideas, observations, speculations and even drafts of poems, Crane's letters richly document his intelligence and imagination, as well as his alcoholism and self-destruction, more intimately than any biography. And whatever the myth of Crane's indulgences may hold, these letters show that Crane was dedicated as an artist striving to create uniquely American poetry.

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Peter Ackroyd

Within his lifetime T.S. Eliot came to be considered the greatest poet of his generation and perhaps the most important poet of this century. Two decades after his death, his reputation, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, remains as secure as ever. His influence has been profound: virtually every poet writing in English in the last fifty years owes a debt to him. Eliot achieved great success during his life. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an influential magazine and book editor, he spoke widely on religion and social issues. But he was also a very private man who remained something of a mystery even to his closest friends. This is only one of a number of paradoxes in Eliot's life. Perhaps chief among them, as this biography demonstrates, was Eliot's insistence on the impersonality of great poetry while at the same time his own work was suffused with his experience and personality. In fact, as Peter Ackroyd points out, "His private choices and obsessions became emblematic of, and in some sense determined our understanding of, the twentieth-century tradition." Eliot insisted on the importance of literary tradition, yet he had no real predecessors or successors. Along with Pound, Joyce, and Woolf, he helped give birth to modernism in literature, but then later in his career he abandoned it. From this biography -- the first authoritative, comprehensive life of Eliot ever published -- we can at last understand the relationship of Eliot's life and work, the better to appreciate his artistic achievement. With this book we now have the first detailed account of Eliot's deeply troubled first marriage, as well as reliable descriptions of the solitude and misery of his middle years and the fulfillment and joy he found late in life in his second marriage. Scrupulously researched, elegantly written and insightful, T.S. Eliot is an accomplished portrait of an extraordinary figure. It will be an essential book for anyone who wants to understand one of the most important writers of the century. - Back cover.

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Leonard J. Arrington

Biography of Mormon Madelyn Cannon Stewart Silver covers her childhood in Salt Lake City, school years at LDS High School and University of Utah in Salt Lake City, teaching at the LDS University in Salt Lake City, marriage to inventor Harold Silver, writing, trip around the world, family life, and church activities. Includes one of her short stories and 42 of her poems.

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E. Ethelbert Miller

"Moving beyond the loss of both his father and brother, E. Ethelbert Miller tells the story of how love survived in his family. When Miller was about ten years old, his father told him how he could have left his mother. Years later, now a writer and a father, Miller looks back on that simple remark and how it shaped him. In Fathering Words, Miller explores his development as an African American writer, the responsibility of his chosen career, and his ambitions to raise the consciousness of black people." "Miller's poetry often relies on the voices of women. Here in Fathering Words, he has chosen to write his memoir in two voices. He places his sister's voice on the page next to his own. The result is a duet that tells two stories woven together as one."--BOOK JACKET.