Appearing in book form for the very first time, this trove of May Sarton's voluminous private correspondence illuminates the life of the beloved poet/writer from early childhood into middle age. Among her correspondents were Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Julian and Juliette Huxley, and Murial Rukeyser. 50 photos.

In the first book-length treatment of Elizabeth von Arnim's fiction, Isobel Maddison examines her work in its historical and intellectual contexts, demonstrating that von Arnim's fine comic writing and complex and compelling narrative style reward close analysis. Organised chronologically and thematically, Maddison's book is informed by unpublished material from the British and Huntington Libraries, including correspondence between von Arnim, her publishers and prominent contemporaries such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and her cousin Katherine Mansfield -- whose early modernist prose is seen as indebted to von Arnim's earlier literary influence. Maddison's exploration of the novelist's critical reception is situated within recent discussions of the ’middlebrow’ and establishes von Arnim as a serious author among her intellectual milieu, countering the misinformed belief that the author of such novels as Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Caravaners, The Pastor's Wife and Vera wrote light-hearted fiction removed from gritty reality. On the contrary, various strands of socialist thought and von Arnim's wider political beliefs establish her as a significant author of British anti-invasion literature while weighty social issues underpin much of her later writing.

Albert Einstein is an icon of the twentieth century. Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, he is most famous for his theory of relativity. He also made enormous contributions to quantum mechanics and cosmology, and for his work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. A self-pronounced pacifist, humanist, and, late in his life, democratic socialist, Einstein was also deeply concerned with the social impact of his discoveries. Much of Einstein's life is shrouded in legend. From popular images and advertisements to various works of theater and fiction, he has come to signify so many things. In Einstein: A Biography, Jürgen Neffe presents a clear and probing portrait of the man behind the myth. Unearthing new documents, including a series of previously unknown letters from Einstein to his sons, which shed new light on his role as a father, Neffe paints a rich portrait of the tumultuous years in which Einstein lived and worked. And with a background in the sciences, he describes and contextualizes Einstein's enormous contributions to our scientific legacy. Einstein, a breakout bestseller in Germany, is sure to be a classic biography of the man and proverbial genius who has been called "the brain of the [twentieth] century."

At the time of his death in 1935, Edwin Arlington Robinson was regarded as the leading American poet-the equal of Frost and Stevens. In this biography, Scott Donaldson tells the intriguing story of this poet's life, based in large part on a previously unavailable trove of more than 3,000 personal letters, and recounts his profoundly important role in the development of modern American literature. Born in 1869, the youngest son of a well-to-do family in Gardiner, Maine, Robinson had two brothers: Dean, a doctor who became a drug addict, and Herman, an alcoholic who squandered the family fortune. Robinson never married, but he fell in love as many as three times, most lastingly with the woman who would become his brother Herman's wife. Despite his shyness, Robinson made many close friends, and he repeatedly went out of his way to give them his support and encouragement. Still, it was always poetry that drove him. He regarded writing poems as nothing less than his calling-what he had been put on earth to do. Struggling through long years of poverty and neglect, he achieved a voice and a subject matter all his own. He was the first to write about ordinary people and events-an honest butcher consumed by grief, a miser with "eyes like little dollars in the dark," ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth. In simple yet powerful rhetoric, he explored the interior worlds of the people around him. Robinson was a major poet and a pivotal figure in the course of modern American literature, yet over the years his reputation has declined. With his biography, Donaldson returns this remarkable talent to the pantheon of great American poets and sheds new light on his enduring legacy.

The Cambridge Handbook of American Literature offers a compact and accessible guide to the major landmarks of American literature.

"Canonized for being insufficiently American although he took America as his subject, chastised for obscurity by readers who would not allow or would not read homosexual meanings, Crane embodies many understandings of America, and of the predicament of the gay writer."—Voice Literary Supplement "A brilliant critical model for understanding how textuality and sexuality can produce pervasive effects on each other in the writing of a figure like Crane."—Michael Moon, Duke University