Richard Daniel Altick

A critical study of biographies of English and American writers from the 17th century to the present, including the works of Izaak Walton, John Aubrey, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, and Lytton Strachey.

Discusses such infamous British murderers as James Blomfield Rush, William Palmer, Thomas Smethurst, Edward Pritchard, Madeleine Smith, Jessie M'Lachlan, Franz Muller, Henry Wainwright, Kate Webster, Charles Peace, Adelaide Bartlett, Florence Maybrick, Thomas Neill Cream, George Chapman, and Samuel Dougal.

McManus's third book, Punch., is a call for the claw-hammer, a hymn to the steel toe, and a series of lonely missives from truck cabs and office cubicles. Punch. is a book about work, about the will that rises and the dust that falls. It is about being lost, hungry, and hopeless, creeping toward the pipelines in a 78 Buick Regal with Big Star on the radio. Sometimes angry, sometimes darkly funny, these lean and muscular poems explore the world of punching in and punching out, the punch-drunk and the sucker-punched. Whether the poems are tightened by the rhythm of a hard hand, or the lines sprawl across the page with swagger, there is real music here. Brute voices, contemplative and haunting, speak to us with unwavering self-conflict and salty confidence. In these poems, life is a struggle and the end is already written, but there's something deeply moving about the resilience and resistance of these voices: Lunch won't be here / for another hour, one says, so when the rain / comes, it is welcome. "Former Poet Laureate, Philip Levine once said we write what we are given. Just as Levine was given industrial Detroit and James Wright was given rural Ohio, Ray McManus was given an American South where 'Every day is the bottom of a bucket. Every day is slide guitar,' where 'blistered hands, hearts, and tongues, give way to callus, the need to alter, to repair.' What Ray McManus has given us in return is Punch.: a tough, tenderhearted, phenomenal work about work. These are poems of lucid witness. Let us give thanks." —Terrance Hayes, National Book Award winner for Lighthead "'Addition is easy,' McManus writes, and he means money in a day-worker's pocket, a lonesome man meeting his lover in an empty parking lot, the handful of bent nails a carpenter can't use, he means the grease and gears and rust and sweat and spit of a working-class life. This is a collection of poems written in the spirit of Levine's What Work Is, whose song is all hard knocks and hard-won knowledge. Its sections are named after blue-collar works shifts, which is fitting--as Punch does the important work of honoring first shifts, swing shifts, graveyard shifts, and hours and days off between them." —Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

The Scholar Adventures chronicles the research behind some of the most exciting and rewarding discoveries of literary scholars. Here are stories of the detective work that uncovered Sir Thomas Malory's long jail record; the dramatic uncovering of the Boswell papers at Malahide Castle; the true facts in the untimely demise of Christopher Marlowe; stories of the Brontës microscopic books of juvenilia; the decipherment of Samuel Pepys' incomparable diary; the forgeries of "rare" works by Browning, Tennyson, Ruskin, Swinburne, and many others. "This book has several of the characteristics of a well-written detective story. Mr. Altick supplies suspense wherever his subject allows it; his characters include brilliant (and occasionally odd) unravelers of riddles as well as some crafty villains; and his style is brisk. Some pessimistic observers insist that there is no such thing as a book which will appeal to both the specialist and the general reader. Mr. Altick has demonstrated how they can be wrong." - The American Historical Review - Back cover.

Presents a guide to the purposes, methods, and pleasures of research in English and American literature. Traces recent developments in the field, including the use of the computer to gather and store information and the ongoing revision of the literary canon under the impact of women's studies, African-American studies, and other movements.

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