In Mark Twain, Ron Powers consummates years of research with a tour de force on the life of our culture's founding father. He offers Sam Clemens as he lived, breathed, and wrote. With the assistance of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, he has drawn on thousands of letters and notebook entries, many only recently discovered. Sam Clemens left his frontier boyhood in Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats. He skirted...

Recounts Mark Twain's life told primarily through his own words. Includes interviews with Hal Holbrook, Arthur Miller, William Styron and many others.

World famous at twenty-four, brilliant and reckless, hard-living and scandalous, Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage before he ever experienced war first-hand. So true was his portrait of a young man who runs from his first confrontation with battle that Civil War veterans argued about whose regiment Crane had been in. Considered by H.G. Wells as "beyond dispute, the best writer of our generation," Crane was also famous in his time as an...

In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and...

This is a biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935): Beecher-descendent, zealous reformer, exhilarating lecturer, prolific writer, scandalous divorcee, "unnatural mother, " international celebrity, and life-long controversialist. It offers the definitive account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life. She launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, "The...