Ten years ago, publishers, authors, scholars, and the reading public watched anxiously for the results of two lawsuits involving the family of John Cheever, famed short story writer, and Academy Chicago Publishers, a small publishing house. At stake was not only a collection of Cheever's lesser-known short stories, valued for their literary merit and historical value, but also the definition of intellectual property. In a dramatic re-telling, Anita...

"Flannery O'Connor may now be acknowledged as the "Great American Catholic Author," but this was not always the case. With Creating Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Moran explains how O'Connor attained that status, and how she felt about it, by examining the development of her literary reputation from the perspectives of critics, publishers, agents, adapters for other media, and contemporary readers. Moran tells the story of O'Connor's evolving career and...

Horace Liveright was a man of puzzling contradictions - a self-professed socialist and a high-living Wall Street gambler, a deeply caring father and a compulsive philanderer. It was Liveright who first thought of books as front-page news and invented the art of ballyhoo to publicize them. A risk-taker in publishing as well as on Wall Street, Liveright had much to do with the creation of the modern American literary canon. Besides Pound's work, Liveright's...

"It is impossible to imagine what American poetry in the twentieth century might look like without the magnanimity of the late James Laughlin, poet and publisher of New Directions. Among Laughlin's closest friends was poet Hayden Carruth, who served as author, editor, clerk, and typist for New Directions and, at a more personal level, "poetry doctor" for Laughlin himself." "Beside the Shadblow Tree is the meditation of one great old poet upon the...

As a writer, scholar, critic, teacher, bibliophile, and publisher, Matthew J. Bruccoli had immeasurable impact on American literary scholarship and history over the past half century. In his more than one hundred published books, Bruccoli demonstrated a rare model of scholarship based on tenacious research, passionate intensity, and encyclopedic knowledge of his subjects. He brought this same spirited mode of inquiry to his essays as well. On Books...