Lady Baltimore, il dolce tipico degli Stati Uniti del Sud, è il piatto con cui il giovane Augustus viene accolto a Kings Port (versione fittizia di Charleston, nel South Carolina). Ma per Augustus, proveniente dal Nord abolizionista e uscito vincitore dalla Guerra di Secessione, non sarà facile l'impatto con il Sud nostalgico e segregazionista; eppure il contatto con il calore e l'intensità dei sentimenti di Kings Port lo indurrà a rivedere le proprie posizioni. Sotto la parvenza di una storia d'amore contrastata, e con uno stile brillante e ironico, si nasconde una amara analisi di un Paese ancora diviso dalle conseguenze della guerra civile e dai contrasti razziali, e in cui ritroviamo le contraddizioni ancora presenti nell'America di oggi. Con una prefazione di Elisabetta Marino.

Il Virginiano è un giovane lavorante al ranch del giudice Henry, in Wyoming. Sulle prime, quando va a prendere il narratore alla stazione di Medicine Bow, sembra solo un cow-boy come tanti, alto, forte, incline agli scherzi. L'arrivo in una vicina cittadina della giovane maestra Molly Wood sarà la spinta a cambiare. Mentre diventa sovrintendente del ranch, cerca di conquistare il cuore di Molly, che non è abituata al selvaggio West e intende respingere a tutti i costi il Virginiano. Ma quando il cow-boy rischierà la vita in un agguato, e poi dovrà fronteggiare il suo nemico giurato Trampas in un'ultima sfida, la giovane si troverà davanti a una scelta di vita. Trasposto più volte sul grande schermo, Il Virginiano è considerato il primo vero romanzo western.

Loosely based on the Johnson County War of 1892, a bloody clash between big landowners and small ranchers in Wyoming, Owen Wister'sThe Virginian is the classic saga of a man who embodied the spirit of a growing nation--a novel that inspired five movie versions and the popular TV series.

"When you call me that, SMILE!"

He wasn't looking for fame or glory. He wasn't looking for war. The man they called the Virginian was earning his way off the land, mingling his sweat and blood on the rich Montana soil as a trusted foreman for a rich man's ranch. Somewhere along the line he made an enemy, made a choice and then made a stand. . .In the eyes of a woman, he was a man of contradictions, as violent as he could be tender. In the eyes of others, he became a hero, a man who had the courage to draw his gun and use it against his enemies--and the courage to stand for justice without it.

"Owen Wister has come pretty near to writing the American novel. It contains humor, pathos, poetic description, introspective thought, sentiment, and even tragedy." --New York Times

Owen Wister is known to most Americans as the creator of the heroic cowboy in The Virginian (1902). Despite his success as a Western novelist, Wister's failure to write about his native city of Philadelphia has been lamented by many for the loss of a literary "might-have-been." If only, sighed Wister's contemporary Elizabeth Robins Pennell in 1914, the novelist could understand that Philadelphia was as good a subject as the Wild West. Hence the surprise when James Butler uncovered a substantial fragment of a Philadelphia novel, which Wister intended to callRomney. Here, published for the first time, is the complete fragment of Romney together with two of his other unpublished Philadelphia works.

Even in its incomplete state—nearly fifty thousand words—Romney is Wister's longest piece of fiction afterThe Virginian and Lady Baltimore. Writing at the express command of his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister setRomney in Philadelphia (called Monopolis in the novel) during the 1880s, when, as he saw it, the city was passing from the old to a new order. The hero of the story, Romney, is a man of "no social position" who nonetheless rises to the top because he has superior ability. It is thus a novel about the possibilities for meaningful social change in a democracy. Although, alas, the story breaks off before the birth of Romney, Wister gives us much to savor in the existing thirteen chapters. We are treated to delightful scenes at the Bryn Mawr train station, the Bellevue Hotel, and Independence Square, which yield brilliant insights into life on the Main Line, the power of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the insidious effects of political corruption.

Wister's acute analysis in Romney of what differentiates Philadelphia and Boston upper classes is remarkably similar to, but anticipates by more than half a century, the classic study by E. Digby Baltzell inPuritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979). Like Baltzell, Wister analyzes the urban aristocracy of Boston and Philadelphia, finding in Boston a Puritan drive for achievement and civic service but in Philadelphia a Quaker preference for toleration and moderation, all too often leading to acquiescence and stagnation.

Romney is undoubtedly the best fictional portrayal of "Gilded Age" Philadelphia, brilliantly capturing Wister's vision of old-money, aristocratic society gasping its last before the onrushing vulgarity of the nouveaux riches. It is a novel of manners that does for Philadelphia what Edith Wharton and John Marquand have done for New York and Boston.

 
The western is one of America's most important and influential contributions to world culture. And it was Owen Wister's The Virginian, first published in 1902, that created the familiar archetypes of character, setting, and action that still dominate western fiction and film.  
 
The Virginian's characters include: The hero, tall, taciturn, and unflappable, confident in his skills, careful of his honor, mysterious in his background; the heroine, the “schoolmarm from the East,” dedicated to civilizing the untamed town, but willing to adapt to its ways—up to a point; and the villain, who is a liar, a thief, a killer, and worst of all, a coward beneath his bluster. Its setting—the lonely small town in the midst of the vast, empty, dangerous but overwhelmingly beautiful landscape—plays so crucial a role that it may be regarded as one of the primary characters. And its action—the cattle roundup, the capture of the rustlers, the agonizing moral choices demanded by “western justice,” and the climactic shoot-out between hero and villain—shaped the plots of the thousands of books and movies that followed.
 

This classic tells the story of the Wyoming ranch foreman known only as the Virgianian, his courtship of school teacher Molly Starkwood, and his encounters with the murdering cattle rustler, Trampas.

Still as exciting and meaningful as when it was written in 1902, Owen Wister's epic tale of one man's journey into the untamed territory of Wyoming, where he is caught between his love for a woman and his quest for justice, has exemplified one of the most significant and enduring themes in all of American culture. With remarkable character depth and vivid descriptive passages, The Virginian stands not only as the first great novel of American Western literature, but as a testament to the eternal struggle between good and evil in humanity, and a revealing study of the forces that guide the combatants on both sides.

Pocket Books' Enriched Classics present the world's greatest literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. This edition of The Virginian has been prepared by Gary Scharnhorst, professor of English at the University of New Mexico. It includes his introduction, notes, a selection of critical excerpts, and suggestions for further reading, as well as a unique visual essay of period illustrations and photographs.

The publication of A Monograph of the Work of Mellor, Meigs & Howe, which documents their most innovative projects from a corpus of over one hundred and thirty houses and public buildings, established Mellor, Meigs & Howe as one of the leading architectural firms practicing during the first third of the twentieth century. Their best-known country estates, High Hollow and the farmstead of Arthur E. Newbold, were two of the most published and copied designs in America before the Second World War. Houses, gardens and public buildings based on the designs recorded in this monograph can be found in every region of the United States. For this reason, A Monograph of the Work of Mellor, Meigs & Howe is one of the most influential books published on American domestic architecture.

The classic novel of post-Civil War Charleston life, a portrayal of the process of healing the wounds of war through reconciliation between Northerners and Southerners on a personal, not political, level. Southern Classics Series.