Choice collection includes the long narrative poem, "The Courtship of Miles Standish," plus such famous works as "The Village Blacksmith," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," "Paul Revere's Ride," many more.

Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. This selection includes generous samplings from his longer works—Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Hiawatha—as well as his shorter lyrics and less familiar narrative poems. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A major literary biography of America's best-loved nineteenth-century poet, the first in more than fifty years, and a much-needed reassessment for the twenty-first century of a writer whose stature and celebrity were unparalleled in his time, whose work helped to explain America's new world not only to Americans but to Europe and beyond. From the author of On Paper ("Buoyant"--The New Yorker; "Essential"--Publishers Weekly), Patience and Fortitude ("A wonderful hymn"--Simon Winchester), and A Gentle Madness ("A jewel"--David McCullough). In Cross of Snow, the result of more than twelve years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work--the soul--of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde. Basbanes writes of the shaping of Longfellow's character, his huge body of work that included translations of numerous foreign works, among them, the first rendering into a complete edition by an American of Dante's Divine Comedy. We see Longfellow's two marriages, both happy and contented, each cut short by tragedy. His first to Mary Storer Potter that ended in the aftermath of a miscarriage, leaving Longfellow devastated. His second marriage to the brilliant Boston socialite--Fanny Appleton, after a three-year pursuit by Longfellow (his "fiery crucible," he called it), and his emergence as a literary force and a man of letters. A portrait of a bold artist, experimenter of poetic form and an innovative translator--the human being that he was, the times in which he lived, the people whose lives he touched, his monumental work and its place in his America and ours.

A contemporary envisioning of a nineteenth-century poem pairs artwork by G. Brian Karas with the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow classic. His brow is wet with honest sweat; He earns whate’er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man. The neighborhood blacksmith is a quiet and unassuming presence, tucked in his smithy under the chestnut tree. Sturdy, generous, and with sadness of his own, he toils through the day, passing on the tools of his trade, and come evening, takes a well-deserved rest. Longfellow’s timeless poem is enhanced by G. Brian Karas’s thoughtful and contemporary art in this modern retelling of the tender tale of a humble craftsman. An afterword about the tools and the trade of blacksmithing will draw readers curious about this age-honored endeavor, which has seen renewed interest in developed countries and continues to be plied around the world.

Of all of Longfellow's beloved poems (and there are many) none is so personal, so sunny, or so touching as this affectionate love letter to his three daughters, "grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with the golden hair." Longfellow's happiest hours were spent writing on a cluttered desk by the south window of his beloved Craigie House, an imposing mansion still preserved on Cambridge's famous Brattle Street. It was here that most of the action takes place (except for his literary reference, and brief excursion, to the "Mouse-Tower on the Rhine"), here that his daughters come creeping down the stairs to beard the gentle, genial poet in his lair. Lang's luminous illustrations perfectly capture the happy atmosphere of that house, the author's affections for his daughters, and the painterly quality of his verse. This book for young readers presents one of the sweetest poems in the English language, her newly illustrated, beautifully presented, and now available to a new generation of readers.