William Faulkner emerged from the ravaged South—half backwoods, half defeated empire—transforming his corner of Mississippi into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and bestowing on the world some of the most revolutionary and enduring literature of the twentieth century. The personal story behind the work has fascinated readers nearly as much as the great novels, but Faulkner has remained elusive despite numerous biographies that have attempted to decipher his private life and his wild genius. In an ambitious biography that will encompass two volumes, Carl Rollyson has created a life of Faulkner for the new millennium.Rollyson has drawn on an unprecedented amount of material to present the richest rendering of Faulkner yet published. In addition to his own extensive interviews, Rollyson consults the complete—and never fully shared—research of pioneering Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner, who discarded from his authorized biography substantial...

On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a startling new vision of Plath—the first to draw from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archiveThe life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of myth. Educated at Smith, she had an epically conflict-filled relationship with her mother, Aurelia. She then married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm and drang of married life in the full glare of the world of English and American letters. Her poems were fought over, rejected, accepted and, ultimately, embraced by readers everywhere. Dead at thirty, she committed suicide by putting her head in an oven while her children slept.Her poetry collection titled Ariel became a modern classic. Her novel The Bell Jar has a fixed place on student reading lists. American Isis will be the first Plath bio benefitting from the new Ted Hughes archive at the British Library which includes forty one letters between Plath and Hughes as well as a...