A landmark gathering of McCullers’ shorter works, including all her published stories, plays, essays, poems, and an unfinished autobiography Celebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in shorter forms. This Library of America volume brings together for the first time her twenty extraordinary stories, along with plays, essays, memoirs, and poems. Here are the indelible tales “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” and “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” as well as her previously uncollected story about the civil rights movement, “The March”; her award- winning Broadway play The Member of the Wedding and the unpublished teleplay The Sojourner; twenty-two essays; and the revealing unfinished memoir Illumination and Night Glare. This wide-ranging gathering of shorter works reveals new depths and dimensions of the writer whom V. S. Pritchett praised for her “courageous imagination—one that is bold enough to consider the terrible in human nature without loss of nerve, calm, dignity, or love.” LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

In their own voices, the full story of the women and men who struggled to make American democracy whole With a record number of female candidates in the 2020 election and women's rights an increasingly urgent topic in the news, it's crucial that we understand the history that got us where we are now. For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights for American women, of every race, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it. Here are the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women's suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims. Here, too, are the anti-suffragists who worried about where the country would head if the right to vote were universal. Expertly curated and introduced by scholar Susan Ware, each piece is prefaced by a headnote so that together these 100 selections by over 80 writers tell the full history of the movement--from Abigail Adams to the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and the limiting of suffrage under Jim Crow. Importantly, it carries the story to 1965, and the passage of the Voting and Civil Rights Acts, which finally secured suffrage for all American women. Includes writings by Ida B. Wells, Mabel Lee, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, presidents Grover Cleveland on the anti-suffrage side and Woodrow Wilson urging passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a wartime measure, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among many others.

In an era of Twitter and televised therapy, it may seem that classic theatre has little place in contemporary society. Accustomed to the indulgences of a celebrity-driven culture, how can modern audiences understand and interpret classic works of drama? In Tragedy in the Age of Oprah: Essays on Five Great Plays, Louis Fantasia provides a provocative examination of the relationship between popular culture and classical tragedy. Making a persuasive argument for the lessons tragedy has to offer today's audiences, Fantasia examines five enduring works of theatre: Euripides' Medea, William Shakespeare's King Lear, Jean Racine's Ph dre, Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Fantasia discusses in detail each of these plays, framing them in a contemporary context that explores the suffering, responsibility, and identity that tragedy advocates. Each play is presented as an engaging, powerful encounter for the reader, recreating as closely as possible the impact of a great performance. A unique look at the role classical theatre can and should play in contemporary society, these essays reveal the lessons great plays have to teach us about ourselves. Directed toward theatre professionals and students, Tragedy in the Age of Oprah will also resonate with anyone interested in theatre, literature, and cultural studies.

A bewitchingly brilliant collection of never-before-published letters from the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS • “This biography-through-letters gives an intimate and warm voice to the imagination behind the treasury of uncanny tales that is Shirley Jackson’s legacy.”—Joyce Carol Oates Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad. i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story—with as many levels as grand central station—with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet. Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson’s college years to six days before her early death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote. As well as being a bestselling author, Jackson spent much of her adult life as a mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is often the everyday: raucous holidays and trips to the dentist, overdue taxes and frayed lines of Christmas lights, new dogs and new babies. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. At the same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis and progress of Jackson’s writing over nearly three decades. The novel is getting sadder. It’s always such a strange feeling—I know something’s going to happen, and those poor people in the book don’t; they just go blithely on their ways. Compiled and edited by her elder son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, in consultation with Jackson scholar Bernice M. Murphy and featuring Jackson’s own witty line drawings, this intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson—writer and reader, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife—up to the light.

Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists—the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing—and elusive—artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees’s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life. Reidel traces Kees’s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.

A story of black and white in the American South with Berenice Sadie Brown, a black cook who mothers the motherless Frankie Addams, a lonely over-imaginative Georgia girl.