Originally published in 1931, this bestselling American family saga from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Ferber shares the story of the Oakes family, as their relationships and property encounter numerous struggles over the course of hundreds of years.In the early 18th century, the Oakes family was one of many working to settle their land in the Connecticut Valley, facing harsh winters and land disputes. Their attempts over the years to tame the land and produce a properous tobacco farm prove more difficult than expected, and when the family takes on Polish immigrants to work the farm, cultures clash, and relationships become complicated. American Beauty follows the goings-on at the Oakes estate from 1700 through 1930, and whether in times of family turmoil or hopeful prosperity, Edna Ferber's cast of fascinating characters and pitch-perfect take on American life rings true.

In this book, the distinguished historian Carl Schorske--author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siécle Vienna --draws together a series of essays that reveal the changing place of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century cultures. In most intellectual and artistic fields, Schorske argues, twentieth-century Europeans and Americans have come to do their thinking without history. Modern art, modern architecture, modern music, modern science--all have defined themselves not as emerging from or even reacting against the past, but as detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space. This is in stark contrast to the historicism of the nineteenth century, he argues, when ideas about the past pervaded most fields of thought from philosophy and politics to art, music, and literature. However, Schorske also shows that the nineteenth century's attachment to thinking with history and the modernist way of thinking without history are more than just antitheses. They are different ways of trying to address the problems of modernity, to give shape and meaning to European civilization in the era of industrial capitalism and mass politics. Schorske begins by reflecting on his own vocation as it was shaped by the historical changes he has seen sweep across political and academic culture. Then he offers a European sampler of ways in which nineteenth-century European intellectuals used conceptions of the past to address the problems of their day: the city as community and artifact; the function of art; social dislocation. Narrowing his focus to Fin-de-Siécle Vienna in a second group of essays, he analyzes the emergence of ahistorical modernism in that city. Against the background of Austria's persistent, conflicting Baroque and Enlightenment traditions, Schorske examines three Viennese pioneers of modernism--Adolf Loos, Gustav Mahler, and Sigmund Freud--as they sought new orientation in their fields. In a concluding essay, Schorske turns his attention to thinking about history. In the context of a postmodern culture, when other disciplines that had once abandoned history are discovering new uses for it, he reflects on the nature and limits of history for the study of culture. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. -- "Kirkus Reviews"

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize Carl Dennis has become one of the most important American poets writing today. Unknown Friends , his tenth book, is about separation and connection, about actual friends we can never know fully and friends never met who are summoned into existence through the efforts of an imagination that insists on dialogue. While accepting our ignorance as inevitable, the poems work to expand the notion of what it means to be part of a community larger than any we can comprehend, both a community given to us by history and one outside of history through which the world of experience is nurtured and sustained.

"Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath's Theater, 1995), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture. This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth and final volume in the Library of America's definitive Philip Roth edition. Here is Roth's selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and "Explanations," a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays gathered are "My Uchronia," an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that "all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy"; "Errata," the unabridged version of the "Open Letter to Wikipedia" published on The New Yorker's website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia's egregious errors about his life and work; and "The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction," a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the "refractory way of living" of Sabbath's Theater's Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth's retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work."--Amazon.

In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings - his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart of the reader permeates The Play Goes On. This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life. Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself. -- from back cover.-- Provided by publisher.

MACKINLAY KANTOR Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville VALLEY FORGE Poignant, tender, and powerful, VALLEY FORGE brings into sharp new focus one of the most tensely dramatic episodes of the American Revolution. With warmth and wit, compassion and sensitivity, MacKinlay Kantor evokes the flavor, pulse and texture of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, transporting the reader into the houses and workshops, kitchens and stables, parlors and bedrooms of ordinary citizens. Here are not only the soldiers of Valley Forge, but the panorama of the Revolution itself. George Washington, lamenting the remoteness and lack of valor in the Congress, anticipating new battle; the sprightly, good-humored Martha, always loyal and loving to a fault; the Marquis de Lafayette, whose poise and dignity belied his youth; Baron von Steuben whose halting English made the soldiers laugh, but whose fierce devotion won their respect. And the multitude-young Mum, a sixteen-year-old deserter savagely trampled by Tarleton's Raiders; Malachi Lennan whose gift of a horse gained him entry into Mad Anthony Wayne's Drovers; Billy, the turncoat, wailing for his mother as he was dragged to the gallows. Sons of farmers and tradesmen, trappers and teachers-some too young to fight, and some too old-surge through these pages, giving life, breath, scope and humanity to the American Revolution and the winter at Valley Forge. MacKINLAY KANTOR was born in Webster City, Iowa in 1904. He began to write seriously at sixteen, became a newspaper reporter at seventeen, and an author at twenty-three. Since his first-published novel in 1928, more than forty books have appeared in print, including verse, short stories, novellas, histories, and books for children. His best-selling, and Pulitzer Prize- winning Andersonville was published in 1955. MacKinlay Kantor's other than book accomplishments range from Hollywood screenwriting to police patrolling (N. Y. P. D.), to combat experience (RAF and U.SAF) in two wars. VALLEY FORGE is grandly conceived, but the quality is equal to the concept. The climate of the war, its taste and smell and the harsh texture of its life, are evoked with mystery. Neither souped-up nor toned-down under fashionable pressures, this is an extraordinarily honest and human book. I am greatly impressed.-MARY RENAULT

This collection of poems focuses on the author's view of America and was the winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

In this lively book, Pulitzer prize-winning historian Boorstin, author of the widely acclaimed trilogy The Americans, illuminates our everyday concerns with his reflections on the new meaning of technology for America and of America for technology. He gives us a bold new view of the two kinds of revolution - the political and technological - and shows us how and why they are different, and why technological revolutions are irreversible. We are a center from which radiate forces that converge human experience everywhere. Though people around the world may not love one another any more than they did, yet their ways of life tend to become more and more alike. These same overwhelming forces of technology that homogenize the culture of the human race have disrupted the international community of nations; large and small nations become "equal," but each day the word "nation" grows more meaningless. Ideology, tribalism, nationalism, the crusading spirit in religion, bigotry, censorship, racism, persecution, immigration and emigration restriction, tariffs, and chauvinism do interpose barriers. For reasons which we are only beginning to discover, and which Boorstin explores in this controversial book, these barriers will only be temporary. The converging powers of technology will eventually triumph.

Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald returns undaunted to examine the ridiculous people and preposterous events that we call our daily reality. Collected from his columns, with a foreword by Garry Trudeau, Buchwald’s satirical voice darts at politicians, power, corporations and the media without pause. A self-described troublemaker, Buchwald continues to represent the great American traits of skepticism, humor, and a refusal to compromise in the face of absurdity.

In this collection of criticisms, Edith Wharton's unique gifts as a story-teller and her superb talents as a craftsman are carefully evaluated. Her indebtedness to Henry James is re-examined. Her more notable novels, such as The Age of Innocence, which won a Pulitzer prize, The House of Mirth, her masterful social portrait, and Ethan Frome, her tale of New England poverty and frustration, are among the works reappraised. Society in Edith Wharton's old New York, at once sophisticated and provincial, dreaded scandal more than disease. Its refinement was a veneer, its conversation mere gossip, its standards double. Society performed conventional rites; intellectual winds seldom stirred the sands of this wasteland. Edith Wharton, placed in this milieu by birth and marriage, turned it into a subject for subtle satire. Though she was no rebel, Edith Wharton was fascinated by rebellion. She regarded pessimistically those who challenged social mores, pointing always to the exorbitant price exacted for the assertion of individual thought. She distrusted human nature and saw the human condition as a struggle between the generous and the mean. She believed that self-sacrifice is almost invariably useless. In this study of the woman and the artist, Irving Howe has included articles by Diana Trilling, E.K. Brown, Alfred Kazin, and Percy Lubbock. Here is Edith Wharton, the literary pioneer who pointed the road to realism, the social historian with enormous powers of recreation, the fine observer of emotions. This anthology should serve to enlarge Edith Wharton's appreciative audience and to reassert her influential place in American writing. Among the essays are: Justice to Edith Wharton (Edmund Wilson) Henry James's Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton (Q.D. Leavis) The Morality of Inertia (Lionel Trilling) Our Literary Aristocrat (Vernon L. Parrington) Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks (Louis Auchincloss)

The Civil War and the World War II stand as the two great cataclysms of American history. They were our two costliest wars, with well over a million casualties suffered in each. And they were transforming moments in our history as well, times when the life of the nation and the great experiment in democracy--government of the people, by the people, for the people--seemed to hang in the balance. Now, in War Comes Again, eleven eminent historians--including three Pulitzer Prize winners, all veterans of the Second World War--offer an illuminating comparison of these two epic events in our national life. The range of essays here is remarkable, the level of insight consistently high, and the quality of the writing is superb. For instance, Stephen Ambrose, the bestselling author of D-Day, June 6th, 1944, offers an intriguing comparison of the two great military leaders of each war--Grant and Eisenhower. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Robert V. Bruce takes a revealing look at the events that foreshadowed the two wars. Gerald Linderman, author of Embattled Courage, examines the two wars from the point of view of the combat soldier. And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., describes how both Lincoln and FDR went around strict observance of the Constitution in order to preserve the Constitution. There is, in addition, a fascinating discussion of the crucial role played by spying during the two wars, by Peter Maslowski; a look at the diplomacy of Lincoln and Roosevelt, by Howard Jones; and essays on the impact of the wars on women and on African Americans, by D'Ann Campbell, Richard Jensen, and Ira Berlin. In perhaps the most gripping piece in the book, Michael C.C. Adams offers an unflinching look at war's destructiveness, as he argues that the evils we associate with "bad wars" (such as Vietnam) are equally true of "good wars." And finally, in perhaps the most provocative essay in the book, Russell Weigley, one of America's most eminent military historians, maps the evolution of American attitudes toward war to our present belief that the only acceptable war is one that is short, inexpensive, and certain of victory. Would any great commander, Weigley asks, would a Lee or a Grant or a Marshall, refuse to fight unless he knew he couldn't lose? "Is not a willingness to run risks for the sake of cherished values and interests close to the heart of what defines greatness in a human being or in a nation?" Another Pulitzer winner and World War II veteran, Don E. Fehrenbacher, concludes War Comes Again with a very personal look at two common soldiers who have no monuments, who have not been mentioned in previous histories, but who point at the essence of these two wars and are "embedded in the very structure of the enduring nation and the world we live in."

The New Yorkers is a glorious look at a city bursting with colour and life. It is a body of work full of frozen moments, serendipity and reflection. Through Robert Herman s work we recognise the New York we knew and the New York we still know today. His street photography freezes people and places in this city at decisive moments, with spontaneity and authenticity. In this book the city waves at us, looks us right in the eye and brushes past us, without seeing. It layers images upon images like the best graffiti -- always renewing and reforming itself. Features a Foreword by Sean Corocoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs, Museum of the City of New York and an Essay by Stella Kramer, Pulitzer Prize Winning Photo Editor.

Mike Teak has a classic Harvard profile. He's a twenty-five-year-old scholar/athlete from an upper-class family who was recruited by his godfather to work for a U.S. intelligence agency. On a covert mission in a Somali village, he delivers cash and cell phones to Hatashil, a legendary orphan warrior turned rebel leader. It's a routine assignment until, minutes after they meet, the village is decimated by a missile assault, and although Mike escapes, his life is changed forever. Echoing across continents, the assault disrupts professor Susan Lowell, who has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her book celebrating Hatashil. Also shaken is Lowell's student, David Ayan, who was born in the targeted village a world away from Harvard's most exclusive final club, the Porcellian, which is courting him and Jane, the smart, risk-taking daughter of East Coast money who's sleeping with him. David Ayan struggles with his identity and Susan Lowell struggles against rumors about her relationship with Hatashil, who has been accused of ordering the village massacre. But it is Mike Teak who faces a deadly struggle--because when he discovers a horrific conspiracy he immediately realizes that he has become expendable, with nowhere to run and no one to trust.

An extraordinary collection of essays by Nobel Peace laureates and leading scholars on the concluded Iraq War, The Iraq War and its Consequences is the First and Only book that brings together more than 30 Nobel Peace laureates and eminent scholars to offer opinions, analyses and insights on the war that has drawn both widespread opposition and strong support.In this intellectually captivating book, Professor Irwin Abrams, considered the leading authority world-wide on the history of the Nobel Peace Prize and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Antioch University, and Professor Wang Gungwu, renowned historian and Director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, have collected works of notable laureates and scholars from diverse backgrounds. The Nobel Peace laureates and eminent scholars, together, expound on the consequences and impacts of the Iraq War ? an effort that has not been made before. In conclusion, there are two sermons by Gunnar St†lsett, Bishop of Oslo.The Prominent Contributors are: Nobel Peace LaureatesTenzin Gyatso (The Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, 1989)David Trimble (MP, Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, UK, 1998)Jody Williams (International Ambassador of International Campaign to Ban Landmines, USA, 1997)Sir Joseph Rotblat (Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, UK, 1995)Jose Ramos-Horta (Foreign Minister of East Timor, 1996)Frederik Willem de Klerk (Former President of South Africa, 1993)Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Co-founder, Community of Peace People, Northern Ireland, UK, 1976)Bernard Lown (Co-founder, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 1985)Peter Hansen (Commissioner-General, United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UN, 1945)Irene Khan (Sec-General, Amnesty International, 1977)Mary Ellen McNish (Executive Secretary, American Friends Service Committee, USA, 1947)Brian Philips of Oxford Brookes University (Quaker Peace and Social Witness, UK, 1947)Cora Weiss, President (Permanent International Peace Bureau, 1910)Christian Dominice (Sec-General, Institute of International Law, 1904)Eminent ScholarsNoam Chomsky (Prominent Political Critic, Professor of Linguistics, MIT)Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel laureate in Economics 2001, Columbia University)Richard A Falk (Albert G Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Emeritus, Princeton University)Sir John Daniel (UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education)John W Dower (Pulitzer Prize winner & Elting E. Morison Professor of History, MIT)Eric Stover (Director of Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley)Frank N von Hippel (Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University)Lord Colin Renfrew of Kaimsthorn (Director of McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University)William Hartung (Director of Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center, World Policy Institute)Benjamin R Foster (Professor of Assyriology and Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, Yale University)Svetlana Broz (Sarajevo Cardiologist, Author and Lecturer)Faleh A Jabar (Iraq specialist and Research Fellow, Birkbeck College, London University)Lisa Martin (Professor of Government, Harvard University)Helena Cobban (Middle-East Specialist and Columnist for Christian Science Monitor)Mahmood Mamdani (Director of Institute of African Studies, Columbia University)Rosemary Foot (Professor of International Relations, Modern History, Oxford University)Robin Lakoff (Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley)Roland Paris (Political Science and International Affairs, University of Colorado at Boulder

"From one of the most respected historians in America, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a new collection of essays that reflect a lifetime of erudition and accomplishments in history. The past has always been elusive: how can we understand people whose worlds were utterly different from our own without imposing our own standards and hindsight? What did things feel like in the moment when outcomes were uncertain? How can we recover the uncertainties of the past, before the outcomes were known? What kind of imagination goes into the writing of transformative history? Are there latent trends that distinguish the kinds of history we now write? How unique was North America among the far-flung peripheries of the early British empire? As Bernard Bailyn argues in this elegant, deeply informed collection of essays, history always combines approximations based on incomplete data, with empathic imagination and the interweaving of strands of knowledge into a narrative which also explains. This is a stirring and insightful work drawing on the wisdom and perspective of a career spanning more than five decades--a book that will appeal to anyone interested in history"--From publisher's website

A profoundly moving biographical study of George Kennan by the fine historian John Lukacs A man of impressive mental powers, of extraordinary intellectual range, and--last but not least--of exceptional integrity, George Frost Kennan (1904-2005) was an adviser to presidents and secretaries of state, with a decisive role in the history of this country (and of the entire world) for a few crucial years in the 1940s, after which he was made to retire; but then he became a scholar who wrote seventeen books, scores of essays and articles, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir. He also wrote remarkable public lectures and many thousands of incisive letters, laying down his pen only in the hundredth year of his life. Having risen within the American Foreign Service and been posted to various European capitals, and twice to Moscow, Kennan was called back to Washington in 1946, where he helped to inspire the Truman Doctrine and draft the Marshall Plan. Among other things, he wrote the "X" or "Containment" article for which he became, and still is, world famous (an article which he regarded as not very important and liable to misreading). John Lukacs describes the development and the essence of Kennan's thinking; the--perhaps unavoidable--misinterpretations of his advocacies; his self-imposed task as a leading realist critic during the Cold War; and the importance of his work as a historian during the second half of his long life.

Collection of stories Bio Edna Ferber (August 15, 1885 - April 16, 1968) was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), Cimarron (1930; adapted into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Giant (1952; made into the 1956 film of the same name) and Ice Palace (1958), which also received a film adaptation in 1960. Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination, ethnic or otherwise. Ferber's works often concerned small subsets of American culture, and sometimes took place in exotic locations she had visited but was not intimately familiar with, such as Texas or Alaska. She thus helped to highlight the diversity of American culture to those who did not have the opportunity to experience it. Some novels are set in places she had not visited. (wikipedia.org)

Winner of seven Molières, the Pulitzer Prize of France, Jean-Claude Grumberg is one of France's leading dramatists and a distinguished voice of modern European Jewry after the Shoah. His success in portraying contemporary Parisian Jews on the stage represents a new development in European theater and a new aesthetic expression of European Jewish experience and sensibility of the Holocaust and its aftermath, a perspective quite different from either the American or the Israeli one. Grumberg's Jews are French to their fingertips, yet they have been made more consciously Jewish by the war and the difficulties of reintegrating into a society in which too many neighbors denounced them or ignored their pleas to save their children. Affirming the new status of Jewish culture, Grumberg's plays insist on the recognition of Jewish identity and uniqueness within the majority societies of Europe. This volume offers the first English translation of three of Grumberg's prize-winning plays: The Workplace ( L'Atelier , 1979), On the Way to the Promised Land ( Vers toi Terre promise , 2006) and Mama's Coming Back, Poor Orphan ( Maman revient, pauvre orphelin , 1994). Presented in the order of the history they record and steeped in Grumberg's personal experience and insights into contemporary Parisian life, these plays serve as documentary witnesses that begin with the immediate postwar reality and continue up to the end of the twentieth century. Seth Wolitz provides notes on the plays' themes, structures, characters, and settings, along with an introduction that discusses Grumberg's place within the emergence of French-Jewish drama and a translation of an interview with the playwright himself.

A selection of short stories from a twentieth-century “American master” (Dan Cryer, Newsday). A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of families trying to heal their wounds, save their marriages, and rescue their children. In "Ralph the Duck," a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage. In "Name the Name," a traveling teacher attends to students outside the school, including his own son, locked in a country jail. In Busch's work, we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors or in the mind of another. In the words of Raymond Carver, "With astonishing felicity of detail, Busch presents us with a world where real things are at stake―and sometimes, as in the real world, everything is risked." From his first volume, Hardwater Country (1974), to his most recent, Rescue Missions (2006), this volume selects thirty stories from an "American master" (Dan Cryer, Newsday), showcasing a body of work that is sure to shape American fiction for generations to come.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter recounts her battle--and those of other victims--to conquer multiple sclerosis with courage, determination, and enormous amounts of hope