"In the aftermath of World War II, Ichiro, a Japanese American, returns home to Seattle to make a new start after two years in an internment camp and two years in prison for refusing to be drafted." --

The landmark American writer profiles the people of a small Midwestern town during the early 1900s, revealing the potential consequences of human misunderstanding.

Henry Adams (great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams) asserts that his conventional education was defective because it did not prepare him to live in a world transformed by the new science and technology. This autobiography provides an insightful exploration of the tumultuous age in which he lived.

ONE OF THE CENTRAL WORKS OF AMERICAN POETRY First published in 1855, this poetry collection by American poet, Walt Whitman is a celebration of his philosophy of life and humanity, and spans the human element from the perspective of both the mind and the body. Instead of focusing on religion or spirituality, Leaves of Grass focuses mainly on celebrating the body, exalting nature, praising the senses, and the material world. He was greatly influenced...

"The author 'shipped out of Boston in 1834 on the "Pilgrim" and sailed around the Horn to California on a hide-trading expedition. The book is based on the journal he kept during the voyage. Horrified by the brutal captain's mistreatment of the sailors, and shocked by their lack of redress, Dana wrote with a burning indignation that did much to rouse the public to the mariners' plight.'" Benet's Reader's Ency of Am Lit.

“My Bondage and My Freedom”, by Frederick Douglass. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events • Footnotes and endnotes • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired...

The story of Loretta Lynn, who rose from the poverty-stricken Appalachian area to become one of the biggest country singers of all time.

On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every...

First published in 1996 to international acclaim, Eric Darton's Free City is the fictional journal of L., a seventeenth-century inventor caught in a precarious love triangle, even as his beloved northern European port town teeters on the brink of catastrophe. In a tale laced with bawdy humor and elements of the fantastical, L. must balance the demands of his patron-a rapacious entrepreneur-against those of his sorceress lover. As L. attempts to avert...

"Perhaps prompted by an interviewer's question (Beattie 292), American playwright Marsha Norman has described 'trapped girls' as an important theme of her work, one that stems from her own childhood experiences growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family: 'I saw myself as a trapped girl as a kid . . . trapped in this evangelical household full of violence' (Myers). Her mother, a fundamentalist Methodist, had a violent temper and strong religious...