An outstanding research guide for undergraduate students of American literature, this best-selling book is essential when it comes to researching American authors. Bracken and Hinman identify and describe the best and most current sources, both in print and online, for nearly 300 American writers whose works are included in the most frequently used literary anthologies. Students will know exactly what information is available and where to find it.

Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies

For a century, Theodore Dreiser has represented for many readers a rebellious modernism whose novels both critiqued the American dream and embodied a bleakly deterministic perception of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was reluctantly published and then ignored by its publisher, who thought the book immoral. Another publisher withdrew his fifth novel, The Genius (1915), rather than face prosecution on obscenity charges. Dreiser did not enjoy widespread popularity and critical acclaim until his masterpiece, An American Tragedy, appeared in 1925. This reference is an authoritative guide to his life and works. Included are several hundred entries on each of Dreiser's books and short stories, as well as magazine and newspaper pieces he collected during his life. Noteworthy uncollected and posthumously collected works are given separate entries, as are major characters in the novels, family members, friends, and other persons important to understanding his writings. There are also entries on Dreiser's publishers, his major influences, the places and events important to his life, and the literary and social contexts of his works. Expert contributors wrote each of the entries, many of which cite works for further reading. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works by and about Dreiser.

"In his life and in his work Theodore Dreiser was nothing if not genuinely American. True to the American dream, he overcame a childhood characterized largely by its impoverishment - material, social, educational, and emotional - to attain a large measure of success. The territory of his novels is often the territory of his childhood: life unadorned in the great industrial cities of early modern America." "In Theodore Dreiser Revisited, Philip Gerber argues that Dreiser's life "is woven ... inextricably into his novels." Like Dreiser, many of his characters struggle to escape their meager, often shabby existences, but generally with much less success than their creator. Dreiser identified with the ordinary man and woman of the early twentieth century. He depicted their position as the tiniest of cogs in the colossal American industrial machine with unflinching realism, making him a herald of literary naturalism." "In this revised and expanded edition of his earlier effort, Gerber places Dreiser at the very brink of the naturalist tradition. He traces the influence of its progenitor, Emile Zola, on the short-lived American writers Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, and shows Dreiser to be the only American writer of note to pursue the naturalist course after Crane's and Norris's deaths. In setting this course Dreiser would ultimately secure a lasting place for himself in the canon of American literature. But in his own day, especially early in his career, the world view he expressed in his books led to controversy and censorship." "Dreiser saw the human condition as a lonely and fragile one in which men and women are easily overwhelmed by the forces that surround them: the destructive effects of capitalism, greed, materialism, and lust on the individual are all laid bare in his novels. The frankness with which he conveyed this idea disturbed his early readers and led to the condemnation of his first and now highly regarded novel, Sister Carrie, published in 1900. It was not until 1925, with the publication of Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, that his contemporaries seemed ready to reward him with resounding praise." "Since Dreiser's death in 1945, and particularly in the 25 years since Twayne's first edition of Theodore Dreiser was published, criticism of his novels has burgeoned. Gerber has added several chapters to this new edition that assess the evolution of Dreiser scholarship. Despite the abundance of biographical, textual, and bibliographic material now available, Gerber expects promising research to continue in several areas now just beginning to be explored: Dreiser's portrayals of women, among the first in American fiction to allow female characters a sexual life, self-interest, and ambition without dismissing them as immoral; the artistry of his writing style, long considered nonexistent; and the psychoanalytic implications of his work. Meanwhile, Dreiser's keen observation of the American experience, begun with the publication of Sister Carrie at the opening of the twentieth century, remains relevant to the casual reader and the scholar alike."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This interdisciplinary study establishes connections between divergent approaches to rationality in philosophy, social science, and literary studies. Livingston provides a broad survey of the basic assumptions and questions associated with concepts of rationality in philosophical accounts of action, in decision theory, and in the theory of rational choice.