When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."

Such is the lament of George Trimble, just one of the many good folk of Spoon River--late of the grave and raised from the dead to bear witness to life. Whether minister or judge, housewife or mayor, clerk or carpenter, banker, lawyer, or town drunk, these monologues form an unforgettable legacy of the private hopes, the dreams, and the aspirations, the successes and the failures, the jealousies and the betrayals, the prejudices and the disillusionments...

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor--William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation--as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping...

A collection of humorous poems such as "The Dancing Hippopotami," "You Can't Make Me Eat That, " "My Father's Name is Sasquatch, " and "Dear Wumbledeedumble."

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many...

The Raven Edgar Allan Poe - In Gustave Doré, one of the most prolific and successful book illustrators of the late 19h century, Edgar Allan Poe's renowned poem The Raven found perhaps its most perfect artistic interpreter. Doré's dreamlike, otherworldly style, tinged with melancholy, seems ideally matched to the bleak despair of Poe's celebrated work, among the most popular American poems ever written.This volume reprints all 26 of Doré's detailed,...

Presents an anthology of tales of horror and the supernatural.

Each short, rhymed story invites two readers to read their own parts, and then read the passage in the central column together.

In the style of Clement Moore's familliar Christmas poem, tells of a family's last minute preparations for summer vacation.

A collection of poems about the four seasons by one of best-known American poets. "In an attractive large-size volume ... 25 poems to introduce Robert Frost to young people. The selections are arranged by the seasons, and Sorensen's handsome watercolor illustrations capture the feel of the New England landscape without in any way trying to provide literal images for the poetry. There's an excellent biographical essay, and at the bottom of each page,...