In her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist's gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature...

Ann Patchett, author of State of wonder, Run, and Bel canto, examines her deepest commitments--to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband--creating a resonant portrait of her life.

Barely 30 years old and a wildly successful author, Jack London determined to follow the example of his boyhood idol, Herman Melville, and explore the islands of the South Pacific. Accompanied by his wife and 2 crew members, London set sail from San Francisco in 1906 aboard the Snark, a custom-made 55-foot ketch. With wry good humor, he recounts both the exhilaration and hardship of a 2-year voyage aboard a small, leaky craft. [From publisher's...

This sequel to Garland's acclaimed autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, continues his story as he sets out for Chicago and settles into a Bohemian encampment of artists and writers. There he meets Zulime Taft, an artist who captures his heart and eventually becomes his wife. The intensity of this romance is rivaled only by Garland's struggle between America's coastal elite and his heartland roots. A Daughter of the Middle Border won the Pulitzer...

Author's memoir of growing up black in the 1930's and 1940's.

This Pulitzer Prize-winner is "the saddest, funniest, most tragical yet comical picture of coming of age in the U.S.A. in the Depresson years and World War II that has ever been written."—Harrison Salisbury.

"That is where the story begins, in your body and everything will end in the body as well." On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sat down and wrote the first entry of Winter Journal, his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life, as seen through the history of his body. Auster takes us from childhood to the brink of old age as he summons forth a universe...

<p>With color, irony, and sensitivity, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that is the writer's life. As it probes and exposes, examines and analyzes,The Writing Lifeoffers deeper insight into one of the most mysterious of professions.</p><p>A gregarious recluse, Dillard has passed many days, weeks, and months in remote locations doing something she claims to hate: writing. The act...

Presents a literary memoir of poems, essays, and intimate family photos that reflect on the author's complicated relationship with his mother and his disadvantaged childhood on a Native American reservation.

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the author, as well as with nearly everyone who knew him, this biography follows Capote from his eccentric childhood in Alabama to the heights of New York society. It also candidly recounts a gifted and celebrated writer's descent into the life of alcohol and drugs that would ultimately consume his bulldog spirit and staggering talent--but not before he'd hobnob with the likes of Grace Paley and Lee Radziwill,...