Arranged chronologically, this book traces the compelling history of the diary, from ancient times to the present. You'll go inside the pages of the world's greatest diaries, journals, notebooks, and letters. Discover what it was like to build a pyramid, travel deep into the heart of Africa, or serve on the Western Front. Find out how writers and artists planned their masterpieces, and how scientists developed their groundbreaking theories. -- adapted...

Surveys the varied impressions and reactions of American travelers to life abroad. Based on letters, diaries, journals and travel books.

Part biography, part tribute, offers a blueprint for a creative life from the perspective of award-winning science-fiction writer and "MacArthur Genius" Octavia E. Butler. It is a collection of ideas about how to look, listen, breathe--how to be in the world. George not only engages the world that shaped Octavia E. Butler, she also explores the very specific processes through which Butler shaped herself--her unique process of self-making. It's about...

"Many of the heralded writers of the 20th century--including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner--first made their mark in the 1920s, while established authors like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis produced some of their most important works during this period. Classic novels such as The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Elmer Gantry, and The Sound and the Fury not only mark prodigious advances in American fiction,...

Homesteader Lydia Sanderson writes about her life on Jump-Off Creek in the higher mountain country of Oregon in 1895. She tells of friendship, loss, daily struggles, and achievements. "Set in the high mountain country of Oregon during the 1890s, this first novel is a quiet, unsparing portrait of pioneer life, recounted simply and without romanticism. Drawing on pioneer diaries, journals and hand-me-down stories of her own ancestors, Gloss displays...