"Saul Bellow wrote marvelously acute, unsparing, tender, ferocious, hilarious, and wise letters throughout his long life (1915-2005). Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages.This self-portrait shows the influences at work in the man and illuminates his enduring legacy: the novels and stories that earned him a Nobel Prize and the admiration of readers the world over."-Back cover.

"When Ernest Hemingway died on July 2, 1961, Mary Hemingway asked the Hemingway's good friend, journalist Leonard Lyons, to announce the death of the Nobel Prize-winner to stunned readers and admirer everywhere. Both Hemingways admired Lyons for his fidelity to the truth, that "he would get the story right." (As it turns out the "truth" was not quite what it seemed, since Mary initially denied that her husband's death was suicide.) This memoir recounts the quarter-century long friendship between Hemingway and Leonard Lyons, which eventually came to include Lyons's wife and three sons. In this short book Jeffrey Lyons recounts visits to Hemingway in Cuba (where "Papa" first taught him how to shoot a gun) as well as nights out with the great writer at such popular New York watering holes as the Stork Club and Toots Shor's. Throughout the book Hemingway comes across as a hard-working, generous, and thoughtful man of letters, and not the gruff, hard drinking beast perpetually looking for a fight that he was often perceived as. This is a book about friendship, loyalty, and trust between a famed novelist and a working journalist and his family"--

The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation's most acclaimed writers. From the city's founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation's capital. In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city's rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington's literary community. Starting with the city's earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and "Star-Spangled Banner" lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book's stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways. Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation's capital through a literary lens.