Books like Unveiling Kate Chopin by Emily Toth

Kate Stanislaski Kimball leaves a glamorous career behind to open a dream dance school, only to find herself entangled with her stubborn contractor, Brody O’Connell, whose heart is drawn to her despite the challenges of love and renovation.

Wallace Stegner’s collection of essays explores the American West, weaving travel notes with reflections on fellow writers and the region’s cultural landscape.

A sweeping biography of Emily Post, the influential American etiquette authority whose classic book reshaped manners for generations.

A collection of short stories set in Acadia, featuring a variety of social and literary themes.

""How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell." That would be in the autumn of 1972, when a very young and green James Wolcott arrived from Maryland, full of literary dreams, equipped with a letter of introduction from Norman Mailer, and having no idea what was about to hit him. Landing at a time of accelerating municipal squalor and, paradoxically, gathering cultural energy in all spheres as "Downtown" became a category of art and life unto itself, he embarked upon his sentimental education, seventies New York style. This portrait of a critic as a young man is also a rollicking, acutely observant portrait of a legendary time and place. Wolcott was taken up by fabled film critic Pauline Kael as one of her "Paulettes" and witnessed the immensely vital film culture of the period. He became an early observer-participant in the nascent punk scene at CBGB, mixing with Patti Smith, Lester Bangs, and Tom Verlaine. As a Village Voice writer he got an eyeful of the literary scene when such giants as Mailer, Gore Vidal, and George Plimpton strode the earth, and writing really mattered. A beguiling mixture of Kafka Was the Rage and Please Kill Me, this memoir is a sharp-eyed rendering, at once intimate and shrewdly distanced, of a fabled milieu captured just before it slips into myth. Mixing grit and glitter in just the right proportions, suffused with affection for the talented and sometimes half-crazed denizens of the scene, it will make readers long for a time when you really could get mugged around here"-- "A memoir by Vanity Fair culture critic James Wolcott about coming of age in 1970s New York"--

From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton's own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.From the Trade Paperback edition.

This is a biography of Louisa S. McCord, one of the most intriguing intellectuals in antebellum America. The daughter of a South Carolina planter and politician, McCord supported unregulated free trade and the perpetuation of slavery and opposed the advancement of women's rights.

Natalie Barney, a celebrated New York socialite turned Parisian salonnière, defied Victorian constraints as a lesbian author and cultural icon of the Belle Époque, entwining her life with the era’s most eminent writers and artists.

An intimate biography of Mark Twain’s formative years in the silver mines of Nevada, detailing how his experiences shaped his ascent to literary acclaim.

Carson McCullers' first‑published autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, traces her life from a formative childhood in Georgia to her later years, chronicling early writing triumphs, complex family ties, a troubled marriage, and enduring friendships with literary and cultural figures.

A scholarly examination of how cultural tradition shapes language, narrative and metaphor in the fiction of contemporary African‑American and West African black women writers.

Edwidge Danticat tells the true story of her family’s migration from Haiti to New York and the perilous journey home in 2004, revealing the intimate struggles of emigration amid Haiti’s political turmoil.

""Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject.... But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to "meddle with" was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe's best-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!"" "In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multi-layered world of nineteenth-century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement, and the entry of women into public life." "Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War, and the private tragedies that included the death of her beloved eighteen month old son, the drowning of another son, and the alcohol and morphine addictions of two of her other children. The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent ministers; Stowe channeled her anguish and her ambition into a socially acceptable anger on behalf of others, transforming her private experience into powerful narratives that moved a nation." "Magisterial in its breadth and rich in detail, this definitive portrait explores the full measure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life and her contribution to American literature. Perceptive and engaging, it illuminates the career of a major writer during the transition of literature from an amateur pastime to a profession, and offers a fascinating look at the pains, pleasures, and accomplishments of women's lives in the last century."--BOOK JACKET.

The South - within its diversity of voices and experiences lies "a shared legacy: the act of speech - of stories handed down in which a distinctive language is honored, a language rich in Biblical and regional contexts; the love of place where individuals, relationships, and family histories not only matter but buttress everyday life. Both are part of that rarest and most indispensable groundspring of literature, memory. The memory of being 'Downhome.'". Susie Mee has gathered a wealth of short fiction by southern women who - from their various backgrounds, from their different eras - draw on that shared legacy she describes in her introduction. That memory of "downhome," whether it is used lovingly or ironically, echoes throughout the seven sections here, which range from Growing Up to Kinfolk and Courtship to Passing On, and in the words of these special authors.