Product info

<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br><b>Essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century</b><p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><i><b>Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing</i></b> features essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century. Each had to figure out what it meant to be a writer within the context of the relatively new nation they spoke to, for, and about. Each meditated on craft and style and form, as writers do. And each confronted the question of how to define themselves as writers--and their literature as "American"--during a century rocked by the industrial revolution, the Civil War, and the emergence of a global politic.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>A strong pick for any literary history collection with a focus on American literature.<br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Edward Hirsch</b> was born in Chicago and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. His first collection of poems, <i>For the Sleepwalkers </i> (1981), received the Academy of American Poets Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. His second collection, <i>Wild Gratitude</i>, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His recent poetry collections include <i>The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems</i>, <i>Special Orders</i>, <i>Lay Back the Darkness</i>, <i>On Love</i>, <i>Earthly Measures</i>, and <i>The Night Parade</i>. <p/> He is also the author of the prose books <i>The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration</i>, <i>Responsive Reading</i>, and the national bestseller <i>How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry</i>, which poet Garrett Hongo called "the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection" and "a wonderful book for laureate and layman both." Most recently, Hirsch published Poet's Choice, which collects two years' worth of his weekly essay letters from the <i>Washington Post Book World</i>. <p/>Hirsch's honors include the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Rome Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and he lives in New York.

Price History