In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers—Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber—whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s.
Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes...

Savage Beauty is the portrait of a passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds and on men was legendary....

Presents biographical information along with critical analysis of the themes, symbols, and ideas that appear in the author's works.

The author shows how Plath's remarkable lyric dramas define a private ritual process. The book deals with the emotional material from which Plath's poetry arises and the specific ritual transformations she dramatizes. It covers all phases of Plath's poetry, closely following the development of image and idea from the apprentice work through the last lyrics of Ariel. The critical method stays close to the language of the poems and defines Plath's struggle...

"This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, a young girl from Camden, Maine, who used her pen as a key to open doors to the wider world. Raised in a female, theatrics-loving household, the sensitive child harbored a talent for words, music, and drama and an inexorable desire to be loved. When Edna St. Vincent Millay was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over." "She was widely considered...

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that...

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009" Phillip Lopate is the author of many books, including the essay collections Getting Personal (Basic), Against Joie de Vivre (Simon & Schuster), Portrait of My Body (Doubleday), and Bachelorhood (Little, Brown), as well as the anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday). Among his other books is Waterfront: A Walk around Manhattan (Crown). He teaches writing at Columbia University, and...

A New York Times Notable Book Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother...