Tom Quirk

"Explores Mark Twain's works--including The Innocents Abroad, Following the Equator, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Puddin' Head Wilson, and What Is Man?--in terms of his interest in the subject of human nature, examining how his outlook on the human condition changed over the years"--Provided by publisher.

During the pivotal period of America?s international emergence, between the Civil War and WWI, the aligned literary movements of Realism and Naturalism not only shaped the national literature of the age, but also left an indelible and far-reaching influence on twentieth-century American and world literature. Seeking to strip narrative from pious sentimentalities, and, according to William Dean Howells, to ?Apaint? life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation,? Realism is best represented by this volume?s masterly pieces by Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather among others. The joining of Realist methods with the theories of Marx, Darwin, and Spencer to reveal the larger forces (biological, evolutionary, historical) which move humankind, are exemplified here in the fiction of such writers as Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.

Designed for the general reader, this new three-volume set presents literature not as a simple inventory of authors or titles but rather as a historical and cultural field viewed from a wide array of contemporary perspectives. The set, which is ``new historicist'' in its approach to literary criticism, endorses the notion that not only does history affect literature, but literature itself informs history. The set features more than 250 survey entries. Subjects include: political topics (Reform, Women's Suffrage); ideas in context (Scientific Materialsim, Darwinism); values (Assimilation, Success); society (Labor, Mass Marketing); genres (Science Fiction, War Writing); popular entertainment (Baseball, Boxing); publishing (Scribner's Magazine); works of literature and nonfiction (``Billy Budd, '' ``The Theory of the Leisure Class''); and much more. The analysis of a wide range of classics in American literature, viewed as cultural and historical documents, cultivates critical skills in reading texts from various perspectives, including aesthetic, biographical, social, historical, racial and gendered.

This collection of essays describes the genesis of ten classic works of American literature. Using biographical, cultural, and manuscript evidence, the contributors tell the "stories of stories," plotting the often curious and always interesting ways in which notable American books took shape in a writer's mind.

The story behind the composition and publication of a literary work is often almost as interesting as the work itself. The essays gathered here under the skillful editorship of James Barbour and Tom Quirk present the fascinating "biographies" of ten well-known works by some of the most inventive and important authors in American literature. From Mark Twain to Ken Kesey, Edith Wharton to Eudora Welty, these writers helped shape the American literary imagination. The workings of their individual imaginations as affected by time and circumstance are the subject of this volume. These critical investigations by distinguished contributors touch upon the authors' lives and loves, their unique methods of writing, and their ambivalent, sometimes stormy, relationships with agents, publishers, and artistic forebears. Unlike critical approaches that treat literary works as linguistic artifacts, these essays seek to recreate a sense of literature as a unique product of the human imagination.