"When America entered World War II in 1941, [it] faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry...

"Many girls in elementary and middle school fall in love with the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. What they don't always realize is that Wilder's books are autobiographical. This narrative biography describes more of the details of the young Laura's real life as a young pioneer homesteading with her family on many adventurous journeys. This biography, complete with charming illustrations, points out the differences between the fictional...

"A brilliant, sweeping history of the contemporary women's movement told through the lives and works of the literary women who shaped it. Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism's second wave. In Still Mad, they offer lively readings of major works by such writers as Sylvia Plath, Lorraine...

The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of legend. Educated at Smith, Plath had a conflicted relationship with her mother. She married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm und drang of literary celebrity. Her poems were fought over, rejected--and ultimately embraced by readers everywhere. At age thirty she committed suicide. Ariel, a collection of poems she wrote at white-hot speed during her final months, became...

"In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl" and Jack Kerouac' On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through this course, which he taught first at the Narope Institute in Colorado, and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present a full history of Beat literature and to record his own stories and memories, ones that might otherwise...