R. W. B. Lewis

"This extravagantly illustrated catalogue - published in association with a major transatlantic exhibition - evokes the romantic fascination with Italy that shines in the work of John Singer Sargent. Both beautiful and informative, this volume includes eighty-five color and fifty black-and-white images. It adds a new dimension to our appreciation of Sargent's art and will delight anyone who loves Italy, as Sargent so passionately did."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book brings together 160 famous American figures from Pocahontas to Louis Armstrong, providing visual and verbal portraits that illuminate their place in American life. The portraiture - painting, sculpture, photograph, or drawing - is paired with literary images taken from eyewitness accounts, memoirs, poems, letters, and biographies, and with lively and informative commentary by the editors, R. W. B. and Nancy Lewis. The whole is a rich addition to American cultural history."--BOOK JACKET.

In this deeply personal and learned labor of love, R.W.B. Lewis, acclaimed chronicler of such great American cosmopolitans as Edith Wharton and Henry James, provides a new look at the glories of Florence, the smallish Tuscan city which has been a prime source for modern Western culture and which has also been his second home for the past fifty years. In chapters dense with historical detail and personal reflection, Lewis reconsiders the principal focal points of this much-beloved city - the Arno, the Duomo, the Ponte Vecchio, Santa Croce - and casts new light on Florence's cultural patrimony and civic legacy from the Middle Ages to the present. With a scholar's eye and a lover's passion, he invites us to share his vision of a city and the way of life it has engendered and inspired.

With both his range of interests and his breadth of perspective, R. W. B. Lewis has cut a broad swath through the world of letters over the decades. He has written on subjects from the Greek and Roman classics through modern European writers to such Americans as Ralph Ellison and Robert Penn Warren. He takes a special interest in the historical and biographical contests from which literature emerges. Here is the first collection of Lewis's essays in nearly thirty years, and it includes several never before published. As Lewis himself says, the volume represents "a retracing of cultural steps," as well as "the conflicting preoccupations of a humanist."

Traces the origins, development, and flowering of the intellectual family, from its eighteenth-century Irish origins to the death of the novelist Henry James in 1916.

Presents nearly 400 letters selected from the American author's voluminous correspondence, including exchanges with Bernard Berenson, Henry James, and Morton Fullerton, among many others.

Contains complete text of [Ethan Frome]( plus these supplementary materials: Biographical sketch of Edith Wharton. - Excerpt from Wharton's autobiography, 'A Backward Glance.' - Literary criticism of Ethan Frome, by Elizabeth Ammons. - Complementary poems and short stories.