"Harold Bloom ... returns with a definitive yet personal book on twelve American writers upon whose work he believes the American canon is built. While his references to American writers are wide-ranging, he focuses on twelve: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane-- those writers whose works make...

Dr. Coles shows how the work of writers, artists, and thinkers of the past two centuries can inspire our own reflections on our daily lives. He offers a compelling call to venture outside our own selves and lives and to listen, attentively and with growing humanity, to the way others get through life, and he encourages us to examine our own character, kindness, and complexity by studying the wisdom of authors from Charles Dickens to Flannery O'Connor,...

Profiles twelve modern women writers whose works challenged society's beliefs about vital issues.