Recommendations based on "Frederick Douglass : Autobiographies : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / My Bondage and My Freedom / Life and Times of Frederick Douglass"

Losing control of his anger and nearly killing Simon Bauman, the spoiled son of a rich horse breeder, hard-working farmer Jess Sanford finds himself on the run from the law and the infuriated, embarrassed Simon. Original.

If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.

Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."

This classic captures the endearing relationship between a man and his grandson as they fish and hunt the lakes and woods of North Carolina. All the while the Old Man acts as teacher and guide, passing on his wisdom and life experiences to the boy, who listens in rapt fascination.

Essays on Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the working lives of two writers accompanying short stories about the lower class in America.

At the turn of the century, Colorado's Cripple Creek District captured the national imagination with the extraordinary wealth of its gold mines and the unquestionable strength of the militant Western Federation of Miners.In All That Glitters, Elizabeth Jameson tells the better-than-fiction story of Cripple Creek, the scene in 1894 of one of radical labor's most stunning victories and in 1903-4 of one of its most crushing defeats.Jameson's sources include working-class oral histories, the Victor and Cripple Creek Daily Press, published by thirty-four of the local labor unions, and the 1900 manuscript census. She connects unions with lodges and fraternal associations, ethnic identity, families, households, and partisan politics. Through these ties, she probes the differences in age, skill, gender, marital status, and ethnicity that strained working class unity and contributed to the fall of labor in Cripple Creek.Jameson's book will be required reading for western, ethnic, and working-class historians seeking an alternative interpretation of western mining struggles that emphasizes class, gender, and multiple sources of social identity.

This absorbing narrative history brings into sharp and lively focus a period of immense energy, creativity, and turmoil. The book opens in 1886, as the Empire is poised to celebrate Victoria's golden jubilee, and ends in 1918 at the close of the 'war to end all wars', with England knowing that an era has conclusively ended. It vividly portrays every aspect of the nation's life - political, social, and cultural - carrying the reader from the wretched city slums to the bustling docks and factories, from the grand portals of Westminster to Blackpool's new holiday beach, from the world of the leisured aristocracy to the trenches of the Western Front and the violent politics of the militant suffrage movement.

Inspired by a passage from Henry David Thoreau's WALDEN, this wonderfully appealing story follows two friends who have very different approaches to life. When the two agree to meet one evening in Fitchburg, which is thirty miles away, each decides to get there in his own way and have surprisingly different days.

James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, is a noble figure in Scottish history. In this novel, Nigel Tranter tells the fascinating yet desperate story of this gallant nobleman from the initial snub he received from Charles I, the monarch he was to devote his life to serving, through his reluctant involvement in national affairs, to intrigue, violence, treachery, and battle.

"Superb. . . . A great American writer speaks with his own voice about matters that still resonate at the center of our lives."--New York Times Book Review Celebrating its eightieth anniversary, Richard Wright's eloquent autobiography about growing up in the Jim Crow South that gives unique voice to being Southern, black, and male in early 20th century America--now available as a special Harper Perennial Olive Edition. When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy." Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for "obscenity" and "instigating hatred between the races," and continues to remain controversial, coming under the scrutiny of censors today who are banning an alarming number of books. Wright's celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive it while Black. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him--whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he made his way north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo." Eighty year later, his words continue to reverberate. One of the great American memoirs, Wright's account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance--a pioneering literary work that still illuminates our own time. Harper Perennial Olive Editions are exclusive small-format editions of some of our bestselling and celebrated titles, and feature unique hand-drawn cover illustrations. All Olive Editions are available for a limited time only.