Ranging from Big Sur to coastal Maine, and including writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Frederick Douglass, and Louisa May Alcott, American Writers at Home takes readers on a tour of the American literary heritage that is at once grand and intimate. We ramble through the turn of the century estates of Edith Wharton and Mark Twain and nestle into the humbler homes of Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. We are admitted into privatéand in most cases...

"It was, improbably, the forerunner of our digital age: a French poem about a shipwreck published in 1897 that, with its mind-bending possibilities of being read up and down, backward and forward, even sideways, launched modernism. Stéphane Mallarmé's "One Toss of the Dice," a daring, twenty-page epic of ruin and recovery, provided an epochal "tipping point," defining the spirit of the age and anticipating radical thinkers of the twentieth century,...