Offers a history of silence as a powerful shaper of the human mind, specifically in Eastern State Penitentiary and the monastic world of Medieval Europe.

Ranging from pastoral and lyrical to polemical and dissonant, Sarton's poems written over a period of forty years explore private moments of erotic love, public events, and sources of the creative process.

Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant work from one of America's great poets. As the chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse. Ginsberg's raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze...

The Salem witch-hunt and trials have captured the attention and imagination of young and old for centuries. Now Frances Hill guides us through the thickets of history and explains in clear and factual terms exactly what went on during that horrifying period between 1691 and 1693 when over one hundred men, women, and children were shackled in the dank prisons of Salem, charged with witchcraft. Ultimately, nineteen were hanged at Gallows Hill, one was...

"Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. She brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society. This collected volume traces the evolution of her poetry, from her earliest work, which was formally exact and decorous, to her later work, which became increasingly radical in both...

Selections from his four published books, and more than a score of new poems.

"This page-turning narrative follows the twists and turns of the life of hostage-turned-diplomat James Leander Cathcart upon the international stage of diplomacy, trade, and maritime statecraft at a time when America's place in the world was hanging in the balance"--

"John C. Cremony's first encounter with the Indians of the Southwest occurred in the early 1850s, when he accompanied John R. Bartlett's boundary commission surveying the United States-Mexican border. Some ten years later, as an officer of the California Volunteers, he renewed his acquaintance, particularly with the Apaches, whom he came to know as few white Americans before him had. Cremony was the first white man to become fluent in the Apache language,...

"Legendary director Nicholas Ray began his career with this lyrical film noir, the first in a series of existential genre films overflowing with sympathy for America s outcasts and underdogs. When the wide-eyed fugitive Bowie (Farley Granger), having broken out of prison with some bank robbers, meets the innocent Keechie (Cathy O Donnell), each recognizes something in the other that no one else ever has. The young lovers envision a new, decent life...