At age thirty-six, acclaimed poet Marya Zaturenska's work reached its full potential even as she battled emotional and physical illness. Recently rediscovered diaries, published here for the first time, reflect that crucial period in the poet's life. Born in Kiev, Russia, Marya Zaturenska moved to New York City at the age of eight. To help support her family, she dropped out of public high school and held various jobs in a factory, a publishing house, and bookstore. By taking night courses she managed to complete high school. Meanwhile, she wrote poetry, some of which appeared in national magazines. In time, Zaturenska would publish eight books of poetry and a biography of Christina Rossetti for which she won critical acclaim. With her husband, Horace Gregory, she wrote A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940—and counted among her literary contemporaries Willa Cather, Theodore Raethke, May Sarton, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Padraic and Mary Colum, and Malcolm Cowley. Significantly, these papers reveal a woman whose life brimmed with creativity, love of family, and good humor in the face of despair. Her keen poet's eye offers biting commentary on New York's literary scene. Furthermore, she not only chronicles the onset of World War II but also observes how the war reshaped American literary tastes and attitudes.

Praised for her lyricism and mastery of meter and rhyme, Marya Zaturenska's poetry lit up American literature in the 1900s. But with the giddy 1920s, Zaturenska's traditional lyric grace and penchant for artifice rendered her passé. By her mid-thirties, Zaturenska had succumbed to emotional and physical illness. At the same time her work blossomed and critics acclaimed her for elevating lyric conventions to new plateaus. In 1937, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her magical collection, Cold Morning Sky. She was only thirty-six years old at the time. Critics pointed out that Zaturenska had assimilated lyric conventions and made them original and new. "What is so fine about these poems is that the control implicit in them does not lead to sterility or to false emotion," wrote the New York Times Book Review. "She is a mystic, but how neatly she refines the word." This new edition consists of over one hundred poems and twenty translations drawn from eight previous books. Early poetry from her teenage years reveals Zaturenska's budding talent, and an introduction by fellow poet and close friend Robert Phillips places this gifted writer firmly in both the historic and lyric tradition.

More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.

Robert Phillips's conversational yet penetrating approach yields self-assessments that read like new essays by the writers themselves. Conducted over the course of twenty years, many of these pieces were first published in the Paris Review. Taken from a passage Henry James, the title speaks to the" madness" that drives our greatest works of creativity. Phillips's interviews bring out this "madness" in its most important sense: the writers are seers and visionaries, whose works inspire us beyond the limits of reason. The conversations recorded in The Madness of Art attain that same level of inspiration and power. Phillips questions his interviewees about their work methods, daily lives, influences, sources of inspiration, relationship to other literary figures, response to critics, choice of genre, audience, and reasons for writing.

American Night, the final volume of an unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, Wald shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more suggestive of the "negative dialectics" of Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left. Establishing new points of contact among Kenneth Fearing, Ann Petry, Alexander Saxton, Richard Wright, Jo Sinclair, Thomas McGrath, and Carlos Bulosan, Wald argues that these writers were in dialogue with psychoanalysis, existentialism, and postwar modernism, often generating moods of piercing emotional acuity and cosmic dissent. He also recounts the contributions of lesser known cultural workers, with a unique accent on gays and lesbians, secular Jews, and people of color. The vexing ambiguities of an era Wald labels "late antifascism" serve to frame an impressive collective biography.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-301) and index.