The author of "Jesus and Yahweh" and "The Western Canon" captures America's spiritual life in the words of 225 of its greatest poets.

For the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America's greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel. Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman’s friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel’s extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman’s observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet’s more personal side—his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America’s greatest poet.

Our foremost literary critic celebrates the American pantheon of great writers from Emerson and Whitman to Hurston and Ellison, to Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon. Harold Bloom is our greatest living student of literature, "a colossus among critics" (The New York Times) and a "master entertainer" (Newsweek). Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than half a century, in such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Now, in the first collection devoted to his illuminating writings specifically on American literature, Bloom reflects on the surprising ways American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The American Canon gathers five decades of Bloom's essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from several of his books, weaving them together into an unrivalled tour of the great American bookshelf. Always a champion of aesthetic power, Bloom tells the story of our national literature in terms of artistic struggle against powerful predecessors and the American thirst for selfhood. All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom--Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop--are here, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison, Hurston, LeGuin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's enthusiasm for these American geniuses is contagious, and he reminds us how these writers have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be yet better versions of ourselves.

A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.

An intimate first book of personal essays and incisive commentary from the editor of Poetry.

A collection of writings from and about New England’s Great Awakening—a spiritual movement that gave rise to American evangelicalism—from the theologian and philosopher who first reported it to the masses Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is recognized today as a great theologian and philosopher. In his own day Edwards was best known as a leader of what is now known as the Great Awakening: a series of small-town revivals that mushroomed into a movement credited with giving birth to American evangelicalism and laying the groundwork for the American Revolution. In authoritative texts drawn from first editions and manuscript sources, this volume brings together all of Edwards’s essential writings from and about the revivals, including the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and his vivid Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundreds of Souls, the work that first publicized the awakenings. Characterized by precise logic and powerful imagery, his writing continues to inspire students and spiritual seekers alike. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Starred Review from Booklist: "This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet's work... [a] landmark collection." From the Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams: "Jim Harrison...was among the great ones—an elevated soul in all his unruliness who favored his senses and courted the wild on the page and in the world. His was a storied life that loomed large, and we are the beneficiaries. 'Such a powerful wounded poet—wrote as if he had to sing with a cut throat . . . and he did have to sing,' said Jorie Graham." Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is the definitive collection from one of America’s iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career, as well as a section of previously unpublished "Last Poems." Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem “correspondence” with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser. Weaving throughout these 1000 pages are Harrison’s legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. Jim Harrison: Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details, or as Publishers Weeklycalled him, “an untrammeled renegade genius... a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.” NOTE:Jim Harrison: Complete Poems also appears as a three-volume box set. Print run limited to 750 copies. Each volume is introduced by a different writer: Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman. The box set retails for $85 and ISBN is 9781556596414.