American Writers Classics, Volume 2

This is the second volume in a series that should prove immensely useful to students of literature who wish to benefit from the careful reflection on a single text by someone who has thought long and hard about that text. The series itself represents a further development of the American Writers series.
This second volume of American Classics is largely concerned with novels. A fair number of novels were chosen that must be considered central to the American tradition of literary fiction.

AMERICAN WRITERS, Supplement XVIII

In this eighteenth supplement of American Writers, we offer eighteen articles on writers of fiction, drama (including film), and poetry (including song lyrics, in the case of Bob Dylan). Each of the writers discussed is accomplished, having made a major contribution to one or more of the genres of literature, and none of them has yet been featured in this series.

AMERICAN WRITERS, Supplement XIX

The writers studied in this supplement are mostly contemporary, although a few have roots in the early twentieth century. David Budbill, W. S. Di Piero, Mark Halliday, Ted Kooser, Molly Peacock, and Bruce Weigl are mainly poets by trade, though most of them have also worked in other areas.
While each of the writers discussed in this supplement has already found an audience—a large one in the case of Robert B. Parker—few of them have yet to receive the kind of sustained attention they deserve, although each has been reviewed at length in periodicals.

Richard III (Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages)

Equal parts tragedy and history play, Richard III chronicles the rise and short reign of its diabolical title character. Of this masterful creation, esteemed critic Harold Bloom has written, "The manipulative, highly self-conscious, obsessed hero-villain moves himself from being the passive sufferer of his own moral and/or physical deformity to becoming a highly active melodramatist."

Henry V (Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages)

The wild and undisciplined child depicted as Prince Hal in the two-part Henry IV grows to become a courageous and deft leader. Based on the life of its title monarch, Henry V chronicles the events surrounding the battle of Agincourt in 1415, part of the Hundred Years' War. In the centerpiece of the play, the Saint Crispin's Day speech, Henry praises the English forces with the well-known words: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."