The story of the murder of Thomas a Becket as seen through the eyes of the poet. A dramatization in verse of the murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury.

The author of The Seven Storey Mountain explores the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross. Merton defines Christian mysticism, especially as expressed by the Spanish Carmelite St. John of the Cross, and he offers the contemplative experience as an answer to the irreligion and barbarism of our times.

The great American poet's essential collection spanning fifty-years of verse, with an introduction by Mark Van Doren. With major contributions in the realms of journalism, biography and children's fiction, Carl Sandburg was a luminary of twentieth-century American literature. But, he was first a foremost a poet who transformed the diversity of his experience into powerfully vivid and beloved verse. This selection of Sandburg's poems is culled...

A Long Way from Home is a novel by Claude McKay, a Jamaican-American writer and poet. Published in 1937, the book is set in the early 20th century and follows the experiences of its protagonist, a black man named Jean-Jacques "Jake" Delaney, as he embarks on a journey of self-discovery and cultural exploration. The novel begins with Jake leaving his native Jamaica to seek opportunities in the United States. He arrives in the bustling city of New York...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes a classic fairy tale and turns it into a novel set along the eighteenth-century frontier of the Natchez Trace. In the clammy forests of Louisiana, somewhere between New Orleans and the muddy Mississippi River, the berry-stained bandit of the woods, Jamie Lockhart, saves the life of a gullible planter. In reward, Jamie is given shelter-only to kidnap the planter's lovely young daughter, Rosamund. It's an impulsive...

The classic, gritty, and tragic tale of desperation and betrayal in Ireland that inspired John Ford's Academy Award—winning film. Dublin, 1920s. In the aftermath of the Irish Civil War, strong but simpleminded Gypo Nolan is at the end of his rope. Desperate to escape to America with his girlfriend, all he needs is money. Meanwhile, his friend and former comrade Frankie McPhillip is a dedicated member of the IRA-and wanted by the police for murder. When...

The romance of Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux captures "the real drama of ambition, passion, and personality in the pageant of veracious history" (The Philadelphia Inquirer).   The author who helped to shape the modern biography turned his glorious prose and searing wit to one of the most famous romances in British history, that of Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. As the San Francisco Chronicle raved, "Elizabeth is...

An ambitious man and his adoring daughter are separated and estranged by an ocean and by the tides of history in this "marvelous" novel (Los Angeles Times).
For Anna Schoene, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire who leads a charmed but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face...

A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy our air really is (the air filling Carnegie Hall, for example, weighs seventy thousand pounds). A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds a set of winds that constantly blow five miles above our heads. An impoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes move in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door. A well-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer (he also came...