"Gary Snyder is one of America's indispensable poets, the "Thoreau of the Beat Generation" and our "poet laureate of deep ecology." Now, for the first time, all of Snyder's poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative Library of America volume. Here are all of Snyder's published books of poetry spanning a career of almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country reflect his hardscrabble...

Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac's sense of mission as a writer. This landmark edition brings together for the first time all Kerouac's major poetic works--Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Poems All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Book of Haikus--along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time. He wrote poetry in every period of his life, in forms as diverse as...

"Herman Melville ranks with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as one of the three great American poets of the nineteenth century. Whether meditating on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, the mysteries of faith and doubt in the Holy Land, or the strange relationship between the Maldive Shark and the pilot fish that glide before "his Gorgonian head," Melville's verse combines precise physical detail and rich metaphysical speculation in an unorthodox...

" ... Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, 'The Civil War: The First Year' brings together over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis ..."--Dust jacket flap.

A compilation of works by the African-American writer includes the author's modernist novel "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, " as well as a selection of his essays, topical editorials from the New York Age, and poetry and lyrics, including "God's Trombones."