This book will have Twain scholars and fans vigorously discussing its merits for years to come. The author takes as his subject the relationship between Mark Twain and his older brother, Orion, traditionally presented as a bit of a... Read More

Every few months, it seems, a publisher announces the rediscovery of a “lost masterpiece.” While Herbert Lottman, a correspondent for Publisher’s Weekly and a friend and longtime champion of the author, never uses that term in his... Read More

Writers spend long hours alone. Because the act of writing is usually done in isolation, there remains a mystery about the process. An aspiring athlete can go to a game and watch an idol in action, studying the master’s jumpshots to... Read More

This book is a remarkable piece of literary historical recovery. The author traces the rise and development of African American literary societies from the pre-Civil War era to the Harlem Renaissance, and shows how those societies... Read More

For too long, the canon of Southern literary studies was almost exclusively white, while scholars examining the African American literary tradition virtually ignored the importance of regional geography. In her previous work,... Read More

When Eudora Welty died last year, American letters lost one of its greatest treasures. Welty has long attracted the attention of critics and scholars, but Marrs has authored the first full-length study to appear after her death,... Read More

The author introduces his collection of southern-themed essays by recalling an interview he once conducted with Los Angeles-born actor Nicolas Cage. While that may at first seem an odd choice, it is actually quite appropriate. Martin... Read More

In the spring of 1888, Horace Traubel, 29, began almost daily visits with Walt Whitman, who was almost 69. For the next four years until Whitman’s death in 1892, Traubel played Boswell to Whitman’s Samuel Johnson, recording the daily... Read More