Ezra M Greenspan

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture--a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionizing the professions of printer, publisher, bookseller...

Written for this volume by an international team of distinguished Whitman scholars, these essays address a wide range of contemporary issues in his life and art through varying approaches. The volume includes a chronology of Whitman's life and suggestions for further reading.

First published in 1923, this anthology provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature. It includes landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. The volume offers the final 1923 version of the te...

One in three Americans will be diagnosed with cancer during his or her lifetime. Many patients, frightened by the diagnosis, surrender themselves completely to their doctor's control and become only marginally involved in the decision-making process and management of their own treatment. Cancer surv...

George Palmer Putnam (1814–1872) was arguably the most important American publisher of the nineteenth century, a man fully and multiply involved in developments transforming all aspects of literary culture. In this comprehensive cultural biography, Ezra Greenspan offers a wide-ranging account of a r...

Born into slavery in Kentucky, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was kept functionally illiterate until after his escape at the age of nineteen. Remarkably, he became the most widely published and versatile African American writer of the nineteenth century as well as an important leader in the aboliti...

First published in 1923, this anthology provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature. It includes landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. The volume offers the final 1923 version of the te...

This sourcebook includes the full text of Song of Myself. Since 1855, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has been enjoyed, debated, parodied and imitated by readers, critics and artists crossing national and linguistic boundaries. Many argue that it is the most influential poem ever written by an America...