Classic Biography

Whenever the subject of Lincoln is brought up, it usually produces a mixed response ranging from adoration to excoriation. Back in 1931 when Lincoln the Man appeared, there were few willing to publicly judge Lincoln on the basis of anything less than hagiographic platitudes. That all changed when the famous poet and writer Edgar Lee Masters published Lincoln the Man. This book is less a biography and more of an analysis of Lincoln’s thinking process and political evolution from backwoods lawyer to president of the United States.

The late film icon and screen legend Kirk Douglas was married to Anne Buydens for more than six decades. Here they both look back on a lifetime filled with drama both on and off the screen. Sharing priceless correspondence with each other as well as the celebrities and world leaders they called friends, Kirk and Anne is a candid portrayal of the pleasures and pitfalls of a Hollywood life lived in the public eye. Compiled from Anne's private archive of letters and photographs, this is an intimate glimpse into the Douglases' courtship and marriage.

In Volume Four, Dumas relates the 1819 murder of German dramatist August von Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand, the campaign to destroy Father Urbain Grandier in 1634, who was successfully convicted of witchcraft and put to a brutal death, and the consequences of the amorous relationship between the prince of Brancaleone and Nisida.

Maureen O'Hara is the first book-length biography of the screen legend hailed as the "Queen of Technicolor". Following the star from her childhood in Dublin to the height of fame in Hollywood, film critic Aubrey Malone draws on new information from the Irish Film Institute, production notes from films, and details from historical film journals, newspapers, and fan magazines.

An engaging, moving, and inspiring memoir, The Bee and the Acorn traces the journey of Wallace and her family to the historic Georgia coastal town of Savannah, where they set about creating a new university for the arts. The tiny college would be a radically different kind of institution, buzzing with progressive ideas about what education could be and what it should do for students. Nearly 40 years later, SCAD has become one of the largest and most highly regarded arts universities in the world.

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered.

In 1902, newly-married Jeannie Gunn (Mrs Aeneas Gunn) left the security and comfort of her Melbourne home to travel to the depths of the Northern Territory, Australia, where her husband had been appointed manager of 'The Elsey', a large cattle station. One of the very few white women in the area, she was at first resented by people on and around the station, till her warmth and spirit won their affection and respect. This is her moving and simple account of her life amidst the beauty and cruelty of the land.

Jeff Corey (1914-2002) made a name for himself in the 1940s as a character actor in films like The Killers (1946). Everything changed in 1951, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Corey refused to name names and was promptly blacklisted, which forced him to walk away from a vibrant livelihood as an actor and embark on a career as one of the industry's most revered acting instructors. In Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act, Corey recounts his extraordinary story.

As a young man growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, Robert Morgan was a fast-driving party boy - a hell-raiser. But when his mother committed suicide upon learning she had inoperable brain cancer, Morgan's life changed dramatically. He was no longer a carefree playboy; he was a man searching for meaning. He found that meaning at the controls of an airplane, and in the flak-and fighter-filled skies over Occupied France and Nazi Germany.

Told in the unmistakable voice of America’s immortal storyteller, this chronicle of a vanishing past is a tale of two journeys. The first is that of Samuel Clemens, young antebellum-era steamboat pilot who navigates wide-eyed passengers on the Mississippi. And the second tells of a reflective Mark Twain. He’d return, years later, to observe the inevitable and dismaying post-Civil War developments along the currents of the ever-changing Great River.

This Jules Verne Collection will carry you away to underwater adventures, will take you deep inside the earth, and pull you on a journey around the world. Are you ready to travel to faraway lands, to be tracked by the authorities, and to encounter prehistoric monsters? If you are ready for adventure, then join us along with the protagonists of each of the three stories in this collection of science fiction and surreal tales.

Figures of Earth, subtitled "A Comedy of Appearances", follows the vicissitudes of Dom Manuel the Redeemer from his lowly swineherd origins through his unlikely elevation to the Count of Poictesme, and beyond. Published in 1921, it was the second volume of “The Biography of Manuel”, Cabell’s great work about an imaginary land that also managed to skewer the world of his upbringing as a Southern Gentleman of Virginia, and nearly everything else, besides!

In the heart of the Swiss Alps stand the three majestic peaks of the Bernese Oberland, Europe's most famous mountain range. The highest, at 13,638 feet, is the Jungfrau. Next is the Mönch at 13,465 feet. But it is the smallest, the Eiger, rising 13,038 feet above sea level, that is by far the deadliest.

The book begins in 1521 at the great turning point in the life of St Ignatius, when he was wounded at the battle of Pamplona. It then covers the next 17 years up to the arrival of Ignatius and his early companions in Rome. Those were the years of pilgrimage, travel and searching, and of preparation for the establishment of the great religious order he would found.

The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic is an important revelation in the legacy of Thompson, with letters that survived precarious shipping and travel over decades, cloaked away from the public. “If Hell’s Angels hadn’t happened I never would have been able to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or anything else . . . I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing,” Hunter told Paris Review.

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole."

Screenwriter Jeb Rosebrook presents a captivating behind-the-scenes memoir of the making of Junior Bonner, a 1972 Western classic starring Steve McQueen and directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. He was called both "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia" and is one of the most prominent figures in African-American history and United States history.

In Ted W. Lawson’s classic Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Lawson gives a vivid eyewitness account of the unorthodox assignment that 85 intrepid volunteer airmen - the “Tokyo Raiders” - under the command of celebrated flier James H. Doolittle executed in April 1942. The plan called for 16 B-25 twin-engine medium bombers of the Army Air Corps to take off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, bomb industrial targets in Japan, and land at airfields in China.

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous "escape-proof" wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold, by any means necessary.