Bernard Augustine De Voto

From the 16th century through the year 1805, De Voto tells the story of American westward expansion, emphasizing that not only the promise of material gains but also the satisfactions of conquering a wilderness spurred on the indomitable explorers and pioneers.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. Across the Wide Missouri tells the compelling story of the climax and decline of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1830s. More than a history, it portrays the mountain fur trade as a way of business and a way of life, vividly illustrating how it shaped the expansion of the American West.

Sixteen months in the lives of a group of lost generation Bostonians. -- Hanna.

Beginning in 1835, the birth year of Samuel Clemens, and extending through the Gilded Age, Mark Twain's America depicts the vigorous social and historical forces that produced the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Bernard DeVoto catches a people moving west: Twain's own family drifting down the Ohio, emigrants of every stripe, the famous and the obscure. Answering genteel critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, who blamed the American frontier for stifling Twain's genius, DeVoto shows that, in fact, Twain's early days in Nevada and California made a writer of him. Mark Twain's America, first published in 1932, enriched by humor and supernatural slave lore, is an enduring work of American literary and cultural criticism.

Contents: Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County from A Tramp Abroad from Old Times on the Mississippi Private History of a Campaign that Failed from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]( Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses from Pudd'nhead Wilson from Following the Equator from Mark Twain in Eruption from Europe and Elsewhere from Mark Twain's Autobiography Mysterious Stranger Letters

Selections include: ... - [Young Goodman Brown]( by Nathaniel Hawthorne ... - [An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( by Ambrose Bierce ... - [A Pair of Silk Stockings]( by Kate Chopin - [The Cask of Amontillado]( - [Fall of the House of Usher]( - [The Glass Menagerie]( by Tennesse Williams

Social commentator and preeminent western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. By the time of his death in 1955, DeVoto had published criticism, history, and fiction. He had won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. But his most passionate writing--at once incisive and eloquent--advocated conservation of America's prairies, rangeland, forests, mountains, canyons, and deserts. This collection showcases the complexity, depth, and breadth of DeVoto's thinking. These essays (many of which originally appeared in the renowned Harper's column The Easy Chair) persuasively advocate stewardship of public land. DeVoto addressed the plundering of resources by absentee eastern corporations, westerners' conflicted relationship with the forces of exploitation, and the degradation of the national parks.--From publisher description.

A psychological romance of two people who return to their childhood home to understand and recover from their neuroses.