Freshwater Seas

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most...

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most...

This is Carl Sandburg's third book of poetry and his largest. It is also the most wide-ranging.The title, Smoke and Steel, suggests the steel industry he knew in Chicago, Gary, and Pittsburgh, but he writes about many other things as well. His...

Sarah Bernhardt embodied -- and indeed, in many ways, invented -- the persona of the superstar actress. During her life and after her death, she was constantly the center of a swirl of drama, attention, controversy and emotional display, both on and...

The best way to appreciate this long and fascinating poem, really a novel in verse, is to just let it wash over you. Don't try to get caught up in the story, for Byron won't let you do that; don't try to figure it out, for Byron doesn't want you to do...

At one point in his moody, erotic, and barbarous romance of She, H. Rider Haggard puts into the mouth of his narrator, Horace L. Holly, the observation that her story "sounded like some extraordinary invention of a speculative brain." That, precisely,...

This was Carl Sandburg's breakthrough book. It is easy to see how it draws directly on Sandburg's life in Chicago, as it speaks powerfully of the specific character of that city and begins with his famous poem that names Chicago as the "City of the...

Frederick Jackson Turner was the dean of American historians in his time. He originated, and he and his students popularized, the Frontier Hypothesis of American history: that the primary driving force in the development of American society and...

This volume of Lord Byron’s poetry contains four sets of his poems, starting with his famous book of poetry, Hebrew Melodies, and continuing with the Poems of the Separation, poetry he wrote in the period 1816-1823, his Jeux d’Esprit, and a group of...

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most...

The Kalevala is the signature work of traditional Finnish culture. In story after story, it explores the human and divine world as understood by the traditional runic singers of the north. It sings of how the universe came to be, how the natural world...

As Hillaire Belloc explains it, one fine day while walking about the town in norther France where he was born, he suddenly decided to take a pilgrimage to Rome. Not just any pilgrimage, mind you. He not only decided to walk the whole way, but he...

When Lytton Strachey published this book, he took the general perception of the Victorian age among English-speaking readers and turned it upside-down. Four of the most eminent and idealized heroic figures of the Victorian age came under his witty and...

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times.In this, the third of the...

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most...

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most...

Carl Sandburg fixed his eyes on the people of his time and place. He ignored or scorned the wealthy, the comfortable, the complacent, the powerful and those who serve them; he had no time for the ruling class. His eyes were open to the immigrant, the...

Imagine a boardinghouse in the days when the Civil War was still a decade in the future - in which an erudite, polished, witty, sophisticated, learned gentleman holds forth each day at breakfast, entertaining the boarders with fascinating talk:...

Walter Lippmann still stands today as one of the foremost figures of American political journalism, social commentary, and cultural criticism. At the age of 24, he published A Preface to Politics; that same year, along with Herbert Croly and Walter...

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language—has minced no words—to describe violent scenes of violent times.In this, the fourth of the...

Rupert Brooke possessed one of the most amazingly sensitive, amazingly sensual poetic minds of the 20th century. Born into a world swiftly sliding into war, torn between highly idealized, romanticized relationships with men and conflicted, often...

John Maynard Keynes died in 1946, but his name is still one to conjure with in economics and politics worldwide. Although his contributions to economic theory established and maintain his fame, he also - particularly at the time in his life when he...

When Lord Byron published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he woke up one moring to find himself famous. Not long after that, when the word of his separation from Lady Byron got out, he woke up one morning to find himself infamous. Ever since then, his...

Sara Teasdale - winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the Poetry Society of America prize, and other awards - lived for love and beauty and died by her own hand. Her poetry shows vividly what an intensely passionate woman she was, so much so that in some of her...

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most...

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most...

This is Carl Sandburg's third book of poetry and his largest. It is also the most wide-ranging.The title, Smoke and Steel, suggests the steel industry he knew in Chicago, Gary, and Pittsburgh, but he writes about many other things as well. His...

Sarah Bernhardt embodied -- and indeed, in many ways, invented -- the persona of the superstar actress. During her life and after her death, she was constantly the center of a swirl of drama, attention, controversy and emotional display, both on and...

The best way to appreciate this long and fascinating poem, really a novel in verse, is to just let it wash over you. Don't try to get caught up in the story, for Byron won't let you do that; don't try to figure it out, for Byron doesn't want you to do...

At one point in his moody, erotic, and barbarous romance of She, H. Rider Haggard puts into the mouth of his narrator, Horace L. Holly, the observation that her story "sounded like some extraordinary invention of a speculative brain." That, precisely,...

This was Carl Sandburg's breakthrough book. It is easy to see how it draws directly on Sandburg's life in Chicago, as it speaks powerfully of the specific character of that city and begins with his famous poem that names Chicago as the "City of the...

Frederick Jackson Turner was the dean of American historians in his time. He originated, and he and his students popularized, the Frontier Hypothesis of American history: that the primary driving force in the development of American society and...

This volume of Lord Byron’s poetry contains four sets of his poems, starting with his famous book of poetry, Hebrew Melodies, and continuing with the Poems of the Separation, poetry he wrote in the period 1816-1823, his Jeux d’Esprit, and a group of...