"I've spent every day of the last seven years regretting mine: he left, and I didn't follow. A thousand letters went unanswered, my words like petals in the wind, spinning away into nothing, taking me with them. But now he's back"--Page 4 of cover.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

The years just before and during the Civil War marked the high point of Bryant's influence on public affairs, which had grown steadily since the Evening Post had upheld the democratic Jacksonian revolution of the 1830s. A founder of the Free Soil Party in 1848 and the Republican Party in 1856, Bryant was lauded in 1857 by Virginia anti-slavery leader John Curtis Underwood, who wrote to Eli Thayer, "What a glory it would be to our country if it could elect this man to the Presidency-the country not he would be honored & elevated by such an event." In 1860 Bryant helped secure the Presidential nomination for Abraham Lincoln, and was instrumental in the choice of two key members of his cabinet, Salmon Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, and Gideon Welles as Secretary of the Navy. During disheartening delays and defeats in the early war years, direct communications from Union field commanders empowered his editorial admonitions to such a degree that the conductor of a national magazine concluded that the Evening Post's "clear and able political leaders have been of more service to the government of this war than some of its armies." Bryant's correspondence with statesmen further reflects the immediacy of his concern with military and political decisions. There are thirty-five known letters to Lincoln, and thirty-two to Chase, Welles, war secretary Stanton, and Senators Fessenden, Morgan, and Sumner. This seven-year passage in Bryant's life, beginning with his wife's critical illness at Naples in 1858, concludes with a unique testimonial for his seventieth birthday in November 1864. The country's leading artists and writers entertained him at a "Festival" in New York's Century Club, giving him a portfolio of pictures by forty-six painters as a token of the "sympathy" he had "ever manifested toward the Artists," and the "high rank" he had "ever accorded to art." Poets Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier saluted him in prose and verse. Emerson saw him as "a true painter of the face of this country"; Holmes, as the "first sweet singer in the cage of our close-woven life." To Whittier, his personal and public life sounded "his noblest strain." And in the darkest hours of the war, said Lowell, he had "remanned ourselves in his own manhood's store," had become "himself our bravest crown."

The Limits of Love: The Lives of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen provides a candid look at two illustrious people who tested the capacity—and the limits—of marriage. The Lawrences come alive not as simple quarreling travelers, nor as blissful domestic partners, but as complex personalities who experimented with marriage to see if it would fulfill their needs. Their antagonisms and their sexual experiences informed Lawrence’s fearless novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. Both works also tested the boundaries of public taste and faced harsh receptions. The cost of the Lawrences’ strong but unstable marriage was high. Despite periods of happiness and peace, angry clashes meant separations and uneasy agreements to repair the marital intimacy when it cracked. Fractures of 1916, 1919, 1923, and 1926 healed slowly and with difficulty. In Lawrence’s most calculated and famous work, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he successfully coded their marital stress and, full of rage, fused two stories of failed marriages. Drawing on many unpublished and recently discovered letters, The Limits of Love offers readers a detailed reconstruction of two complicated lives, written with narrative speed and a forceful style, filled with vivid interpretations of Lawrence’s work, and conveying deep sympathy for people living outside established norms. This new dual biography, based on years of research by Michael Squires, captures the essence of Lawrence and Frieda, making the couple real, alive, and accessible.