Robin Field

In 1855, an unknown but wildly ambitious young poet self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, consisting of twelve untitled poems and an explanatory preface. Walt Whitman spent the rest of his life engaged in expanding and revising this work, through six editions and nearly four decades, establishing Leaves of Grass as one of the central works in the history of world poetry. This edition reproduces the magnificent "death-bed edition," published...

Set in 1867, The Innocents Abroad is a travel book that follows a group of Americans from New York City to the renowned Holy Land. Throughout the journey, author Mark Twain uses humour and wit to make astute observations about the diverse people and legendary locales. Described as the Great Pleasure Excursion, Twain and his traveling companions visit some of the most illustrious cities in the world. They make stops in Italy, France, and Greece as...

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the nineteenth century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says—at least they think they do. The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection....

The Aspern Papers Henry James - The Aspern Papers is a novella written by Henry James, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, with its first book publication later in the same year. One of James' best-known and most acclaimed longer tales, The Aspern Papers is based on the letters Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Mary Shelley's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who saved them until she died. Set in Venice, The Aspern Papers demonstrates James'...

Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. Published the year after Moby-Dick-a critical and commercial failure-Pierre: or, The Ambiguities is a psychological novel in the tradition of Gothic fiction. Melville struggled to find a publisher who would pay him in advance for the book, and its appearance prompted widespread ridicule and condemnation in the press, with some critics claiming that Melville himself had...

Originally published over one hundred years ago, "Roughing It" tells the (almost) true story of Mark Twain's rollicking adventures across the United States. Through his attempts to strike it rich, he meets a motley crew of colorful people, while weaving through humorous mishaps and standing through it all with the endearingly good humor for which he's famous.

Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings - Joel Chandler Harris - Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books. Harris wanted to show that life in the Southern United States was hard and that they struggled a lot. The term...

"Winner of the 1973 National Book Award. In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a[n] historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing...

A collection of poems evoking the world and feelings of childhood. Illustrated with antique pictures by some well-known children's book illustrators.

In 1845 Thoreau built himself a shanty in the woods by Walden Pond, where he lived from 1845-1847. Walden is a treatise on the subjects of self-sufficiency, individualism, relationship with nature, and rejection of material ambition. His residence at the pond was interrupted by a day's imprisonment for refusal to pay a poll tax to a government that supported the Mexican War. This action was in accord with his belief in passive resistance, a means...