When a murder takes place in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd “black” son who has been raised “white,” and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man. In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Twain’s novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it.

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources--diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film--Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification.

These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making 'After

Dachau' a new epoch in Western history.

The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people--sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience--as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation.

Inspired by the 1898 Wilmington Riot and the eyewitness accounts of Charles W. Chesnutt's own family, Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition captures the astonishing moment in American history when a violent coup d'état resulted in the subversion of a free and democratic election.

The Norton Critical Edition text is based on the 1901 first edition. It is accompanied by a note on the text, Werner Sollors's insightful introduction, explanatory annotations, and twenty-four photographs and illustrations.

“Contexts” connects the novel to the historical events in Wilmington and includes a wealth of newspaper articles, editorials, and biographical sketches of the central players.

The account of riot instigator Alfred Moore Waddell, published just weeks after the event, is reprinted, along with three rarely seen letters: W. E. B. Du Bois's and Booker T. Washington's comments on the novel and Walter Hines Page's letter to Chesnutt. Rounding out the historical record is a selection of 1890s sheet music, a poem, and newspaper articles on the Cakewalk, a popular dance of the period with roots in slavery.

“Criticism” begins with twelve contemporary reviews, including those by Hamilton Wright Mabie, Katherine Glover, William Dean Howells, and Sterling A. Brown. Fifteen recent assessments focus on the novel's characters, history, realism, and violence. As scholarship on The Marrow of Tradition and on Wilmington in 1898 has been especially active since the 1990s, ten assessments are from this period.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.

In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.

The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.

In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.

The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information.

Long out of print in America, Alexandre Dumas's most daring narrative is now available in this major new translation by Tina A. Kover. Filled with intrigue, romance, and deadly vengeance, Georges is the story of a wealthy mulatto boy who is driven from his island home by racist landowners. Returning to Mauritius as an accomplished young man, Georges pits his strength against a powerful plantation owner, leading a dramatic slave uprising and claiming the heart of a beautiful white woman. Georges stands apart as the only book by Dumas that explores the potent subject of race.

Praise for Georges:

“A rousing and vivid adventure . . . packed with action and atmosphere.”
–The Columbus Dispatch

“A remarkable discovery . . . We are indebted to Werner Sollors and Jamaica Kincaid for providing us with a critical lens for the journey Dumas has created out of his own generous and expansive imagination.”
–Rudolph P. Byrd, Emory University


“As compelling and relevant today as it was back in the 1840s, when it was first published.”
–Adrienne Kennedy, author of Funnyhouse of a Negro

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross?or are crossed by?what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

The text of Equiano's narrative presented here is that of the 1789 first edition. It is accompanied by an introduction, maps, illustrations, and annotations. 'Contexts' provides essential public writings on the autobiography, general and historical background, related travel and scientific literature, other eighteenth-century works by authors of African ancestry, and works debating the slave trade.'Criticism' includes six contemporary reviews and nine modern essays on the narrative by Paul Edwards, Charles T. Davis, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Angelo Costanzo, Catherine Obianju Acholonu, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Geraldine Murphy, Adam Potkay, and Robert J. Allison. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

Hamilton Holt, editor of The Independent, collected these touching autobiographies of ordinary people--new immigrants and sharecroppers, cooks and fishermen, women and men working in sweatshops, in the city, and on the land. First published in 1906, and reissued a decade ago, this new edition of Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans is expanded to include lives Holt did not include in his original selection, as well as a new preface by Werner Sollors.

Describes literature in languages other than English in the United States, and recommends knowing English plus other languages