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The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser confronts the turbulent currents of 20th-century history, as it explores with depth and honesty the realms of politics, sexuality, mythic imagination, technological change, and family life. She was a social activist of unwavering commitment, a tireless experimenter who opened fresh forms and fresh subject matter in modern American poetry, and a writer who was constantly testing her own limits in a life's work of extraordinary scope."She refused to compartmentalize herself or her work," writes editor Adrienne Rich, "claiming her right to intellect and sexuality, poetry and science, Marxism and myth, activism and motherhood, theory and vision. . . . She was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair." This new selection provides an indispensable introduction to her adventurous and prolific work.About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

Poet, journalist, and crime novelist, Kenneth Fearing wrote poems filled with the jargon of advertising and radio broadcasts and tabloid headlines, sidewalk political oratory, and the pop tunes on the jukebox. Seeking out what he called "the new and complex harmonies . . . of a strange and still more complex age," he evoked the jitters of the Depression and the war years in a voice alternately sardonic and melancholy, and depicted a fragmenting urban world bombarded by restless desires and unnerving fears.But, in the words of editor Robert Polito, "Fearing's poems carry no whiff of the curio or relic. If anything, his poems . . . insinuated an emerging media universe that poetry still only fitfully acknowledges." This new selection foregrounds the energy and originality of Fearing's prophetic poetry, with its constant formal experimenting and its singular note of warning: "We must be prepared for anything, anything, anything." As a chronicler of mass culture and its discontents, Fearing is a strangely solitary figure who cannot be ignored.About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

Over 200 years after the founding of the federal republic, James Madison remains the most important political thinker in American history. The prime framer of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Madison was also a brilliant expositor of the new republican government and its underlying principles. His eloquent and insightful writing on freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the press, the rights of minorities under majority rule, the role of the states in the federal system, and the separation of powers are central to American political thought and speak to the controversies of the present day.Arranged chronologically, this Library of America volume contains 197 essays, addresses, speeches, private memoranda, and letters written between 1772 and 1836. Included are all twenty-nine of Madison's contributions to The Federalist, as well as revealing letters and speeches from the Constitutional Convention, the crucial Virginia ratifying convention, and the first federal Congress that illuminate his central role in framing and ratifying the Constitution and adopting the Bill of Rights. Early letters from the Revolution and the Confederation record Madison's strong commitment to religious freedom, his acute observations on the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, and the beginning of his historic political collaboration with Thomas Jefferson.Selections from the 1790s include eloquent denunciations of the Alien and Sedition Acts and candid private appraisals of George Washington and John Adams. Writings from his terms as secretary of state and president record his determination to uphold American independence during the conflicts of the Napoleonic era and his leadership of the nation during the fiercely controversial War of 1812. Letters and memoranda from his retirement demonstrate his opposition to nullification and secession, his illusory hopes for African colonization as a solution to the dilemma of slavery, and his deepening concern over the sectional threat to the federal union he loved. James Madison: Writings includes a chronology of Madison's life, an essay on the texts, explanatory notes, and an index.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This Library of America volume is the second of three volumes presenting the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.Lolita (1955), Nabokov's single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time. Funny, satiric, poignant, filled with allusions to earlier American writers, it is the "confession" of a middle-aged, sophisticated European émigré's passionate obsession with a twelve-year-old American "nymphet," and the story of their wanderings across a late 1940s America of highways and motels. (Nabokov's film adaptation of Lolita, as originally written for director Stanley Kubrick, is also included.)Pnin (1957) is a comic masterpiece about a gentle, bald Russian émigré professor in an American college town who is never quite able to master its language, its politics, or its train schedule. Nabokov's years as a teacher provided rich background for this satirical picture of academic life, with an unforgettable figure at its center: "It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."Pale Fire (1962) is a tour de force in the form of an ostensibly autobiographical poem by a recently deceased American poet and a critical commentary by an academic who is something other than what he seems. Its unique structure, pitting artist against seemingly worshipful critic, sets the stage for some of Nabokov's most intricate games of deception and concealment.The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov's penciled corrections in his own copies of his works which correct long-standing errors, and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's son.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This Library of America edition collects for the first time in one volume the four full-length works in which Henry David Thoreau combined his poetic sensibility, classical learning, philosophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail into literary masterpieces on humanity's communion with nature.A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is based on a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839 from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted wordplay of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young America, and the earthiness of a lover of nature.Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year's "Life in the Woods." "Simplify, simplify" is the beat of its "more distant drummer"-to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life's essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and nonhuman in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature.The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. It describes the virgin rivers and forests of Maine, the customs of woodsmen and Indian guides, the hunting of moose, and the effects of the timber industry and encroaching settlement. An early and eloquent plea for conservation by a farsighted naturalist, its close observation of the American wild becomes an examination of "the motives which carry men into the wilderness."Cape Cod is the bleakest of Thoreau's works, resembling Melville's prose in its vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Cape Cod appears as both ocean and desert, a vast expanse of shipwrecks and barren soil, peopled by hardy, weathered inhabitants who seem survivors from the age of the first Pilgrims. Based upon his own visits and upon accounts from the earliest times, it is an unsentimental study of human endurance in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.