text and photos capturing the essence of Vermont.

Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau's experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author's transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place "not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world." In Maine he comes in contact with "rocks, trees, wind and solid earth" as though he...

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...

The author takes readers on a tour of the Land Down Under that goes far beyond packaged-tour routes, illustrating adventures with riptides, jellyfish, and Aborigines.

John Muir's account of his travels in Alaska.

This early work by Henry James was originally published in 1884 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Henry James was born in New York City in 1843. One of thirteen children, James had an unorthodox early education, switching between schools, private tutors and private reading.. James published his first story, 'A Tragedy of Error', in the Continental Monthly in 1864, when he was twenty years old. In 1876, he emigrated...

English novelist, historian and science writer Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) abandoned teaching and launched his literary career with a series of highly successful science-fiction novels. The Time Machine was the first of a number of these imaginative literary inventions. First published in 1895, the novel follows the adventures of a hypothetical Time Traveller who journeys into the future to find that humanity has evolved into two races: the peaceful...

An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers
 
To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.
With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads,...

"In 1995 Bill Bryson got into his car and took a weeks-long farewell motoring trip about England before moving his family back to the United States. The book about that trip, Notes from a Small Island, is ... [often considered] one of the most acute and affectionate portrayals of England in all its glorious eccentricity ever written. Two decades later, he set out again to rediscover that country, and the result is [this book]"--Amazon.com. Bryson...