A narrative history of the Inquisition, and an examination of the influence it exerted on contemporary society, by the author of ARE WE ROME?

Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in 2014, selected from American periodicals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature." Following this groundbreaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Publisher Description

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster's comprehensive, landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane. With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Auster’s probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England, where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps over his tragic, early death. In Burning Boy, Auster not only puts forth an immersive read about an unforgettable life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane’s astonishing originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into Crane’s creative processes to produce the rarest of reading experiences—the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only another literary master could tell it.

A respected essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic discusses the pleasure, often forgotten in the modern day, of reading something for no purpose whatsoever in his latest collection of writings.

I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

To celebrate The American Scholar's thirtieth anniversary, Hiram Haydn and Betsy Saunders brought together fifty representative selections published throughout those years. These selections include the best essays that appeared throughout the life of one of the leading publications of the country. The editors give a picture of the changing intellectual climate and emphasis from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. The collection illustrates the unusually wide range and diversity of the regular subject matter of The American Scholar. This work is once again brought to public attention a half century later, and this edition includes a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz.Haydn and Saunders chose essays that were of supreme quality; those included were among the best of several hundred published. They focused on a diversity of subject matter as well as a selection representative of the different interests stressed in the magazine's history. These pieces reflect the prevailing intellectual and cultural currents of fifty years earlier. The American Scholar Reader then, as now, focuses on themes of economics, religion, psychology, social and cultural matters, ecology, and the importance of conservation.Some of the major contributors and essays herein included are: 'The Germans: Unhappy Philosophers in Politics,' Reinhold Niebuhr; 'The Challenge of Our Times,' Harold J. Laski; 'The Problem of the Liberal Arts College,' John Dewey; 'The Retort Circumstantial,' Jacques Barzun; 'Freud, Religion, and Science,' David Riesman; 'Three American Philosophers,' George Santayana; 'Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature,' Edmund Wilson; 'The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,' Richard Hofstadter; 'The Present Human Condition,' Erich Fromm; 'Our Documentary Culture,' Margaret Mead; and 'Equality America's Deferred Commitment,' C. Vann Woodward.