From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Tells the story of a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s who devoted his life to writing about the Black experience in America

San Francisco Beat is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment in a fortunate place. America-somnolent, conformist, and paranoid in the 1950s-was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual, and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah, and the Internet. Thirty years ago, poet David Meltzer interviewed his poet friends for The San Francisco Poets. Now in San Francisco Beat he has combined these classic interviews with recent follow-up. San Francisco Beat features major new interviews with Philip Lamantia, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Jack Hirschman, Diane di Prima, Jack Micheline, Philip Whalen, and David Meltzer himself. David Meltzer is the author of many books of poetry, including Tens, The Name, Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992, and No Eyes: Lester Young. He is the editor of Birth, The Secret Garden, Reading Jazz, and Writing Jazz, among other collections. His agit-smut fictions include The Agency Trilogy. Meltzer read poetry at the Jazz Cellar in the 1950s and in the 1960s fronted the band, Serpent Power. Meltzer teaches poetics at New College of California. Table of Contents/Interviewed Authors Preface Acknowledgments Diane di Prima (1999) William Everson (1971) Remembering Everson (1999) Lawrence Ferlinghetti I (1969) Lawrence Ferlinghetti II (1999) Jack Hirschman (1998) Joanne Kyger (1998) Philip Lamantia (1998) Michael McClure I (1971) Michael McClure II (1999) David Meltzer (1999) Jack Micheline (1994) Kenneth Rexroth (1971) Remembering Rexroth (1971) Gary Snyder (1999) Lew Welch (1971) Philip Whalen (1999) Bibliographies Preface Nothing is hidden; As of old All is clear as daylight -Anonymous haiku, 16th century San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Po

One of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century, Lowell was also a prolific letter-writer who corresponded with some of the remarkable writers and thinkers of his day, including Elizabeth Bishop, Edmund Wilson, Robert Kennedy, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore. These letters document the transformation of Lowell's work over the course of his career; the germination of his moral beliefs - he famously opposed the WW II draft in a personal letter to President Roosevelt and was jailed as a conscientious objector; the development of his work; his reading habits; the relationship between poetry and prose that so fascinated him. 'How different prose is,' he remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop. 'Sometimes the two mediums refuse to say the same things...Without verse, without philosophy, I found it hard, I was naked without my line-ends.' The letters illuminate another side of the intimate life that was the subject of so many of his poems: his deep friendships with other writers; the manic-depressive illness he struggled to endure and understand; his marriages to three prose writers, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood; his engagement with politics and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. 'By far the most famous poet of his era . . . Lowell transformed American poetry.' - Charles McGrath, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE 'In his poems and prose . . . Lowell got more out of the midcentury American scene - literary, cultural, political - than anyone else.' - William H. Pritchard, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'Robert Lowell was one of the three or four greatest American poets of the twentieth century . . . his real peers are the classics of American literature: Melville and Whitman, Eliot and Frost . . . Lowell's torrential eloquence, his historical consciousness, his moral and political seriousness are a standing challenge.' - Adam Kirsch, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was one of twentieth-century literature's most prolific letter-writers. This definitive volume showcases his correspondence with some of the most original and interesting artists of his time, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Lionel Trilling, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky, Philip Glass, Arthur Miller, Ken Kesey, and hundreds of others. Through his letter writing, Ginsberg coordinated the efforts of his literary circle and kept everyone informed about what everyone else was doing. He also preached the gospel of the Beat movement by addressing political and social issues in countless letters to publishers, editors, and the news media, devising an entirely new way to educate readers and disseminate information. Drawing from numerous sources, this collection is both a riveting life in letters and an intimate guide to understanding an entire creative generation.

Leyland, Winston (ed) Love Poems and Selected Letters