A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
A Kirkus Best Book of 2013
A Bookpage Best Book of 2013
Dazzling in scope, Ecstatic Nation illuminates one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in America's past, when the country dreamed big, craved new lands and new freedom, and was bitterly divided over its great moral wrong: slavery.   With a canvas of extraordinary characters, such as P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and L. C. Q. Lamar, Ecstatic Nation brilliantly balances cultural and political history: It's a riveting account of the sectional conflict that preceded the Civil War, and it astutely chronicles the complex aftermath of that war and Reconstruction, including the promise that women would share in a new definition of American citizenship. It takes us from photographic surveys of the Sierra Nevadas to the discovery of gold in the South Dakota hills, and it signals the painful, thrilling birth of modern America.
An epic tale by award-winning author Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation lyrically and with true originality captures the optimism, the failures, and the tragic exuberance of a renewed Republic.

Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (American History)

History

Wineapple, Brenda

Americas

Harper

Harper-perennial

White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century. In White Heat Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love, one that sheds new light on her subjects and on the roiling America they shared.

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Anchor

Power Rangers: Monumental Disaster (Sticker Books)

Children's Books

Literature & Fiction

Golden Books Publishing Company, Inc.

Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said. Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow. In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls. Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual. Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time. Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.

Hawthorne: A Life

KNOPF

Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein

A dual biography of Gertrude and Leo Stein examines their powerful relationship and smoldering rivalries and Leo's influence over Gertrude's early life, and includes a early Gertrude Stein manuscript and previously unpublished papers by Leo Stein.

Putnam Adult

Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

Religion & Spirituality

Random House]

This volume presents an insight into Gertrude Stein's life, and provides a portrait of her gifted brother, Leo. It is the story of the relationship between a brother and a sister, shedding light on a beguiling and complex couple. The name Gertrude Stein conjures up the romanticized Paris of the 1920s. However, for almost two decades before that, Leo and Gertrude Stein had held court to writers and painters at 27, Rue de Fleurs in a salon filled with the bright, bold canvases they were purchasing. Brilliant, voluble and profoundly insecure, brother and sister spent most of their lives shoring up their images, each helping to create the other. A complementary and devoted couple, eccentric and compelling, they were constantly together from childhood to adulthood. And then their mutual dependence proved too painful. Leo denounced his sister's work, denounced the painters he had once supported and, in 1914, denounced Paris for a life of uninterrupted solitude.

Sister Brother

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Devoted, eccentric, and compelling, Gertrude and Leo Stein were constant companions, from childhood to adulthood, until, finally, they spoke no more. Americans, expatriates, and virtually orphans, they lived together for almost forty years, collaborating in one of the great artistic and literary adventures of the twentieth century. Sister Brother tells the story of that adventure and relationship. With a personality that drew people toward her—regardless of what they thought of her inventive, hermetic prose—Gertrude Stein dazzled and perplexed. Enigmatic, intelligent, and self-absorbed, Leo also dazzled but in his own way. One of the crucial figures in Gertrude’s early years, he was the original guiding spirit of the famed salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, which continued for almost two decades. From her early days as a medical student to her first days in Paris, Gertrude was passionately driven toward the career in which she distinguished herself, demanding appreciation as an exceptional writer who knew precisely what she intended. This book shows how Gertrude slowly struggled with what became a unique voice—and why her brother spurned it. With its wealth of new and rare material, its reconstruction of Leo’s famed art collection, and its array of characters—from Bernard Berenson to Pablo Picasso—this biography offers the first glimpse into the smoldering sibling relationship that helped form two of the twentieth century’s most unusual figures.

Bison Books

Living well was the best revenge for Leo Stein, the art critic who took to heart Samuel Johnson’s dictum, “Clear your mind of cant.” Leo shared with his sister, Gertrude Stein, the Paris apartment that became a meeting place for the famous. Reflected in Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose are their early years as American expatriates as well as their later estrangement. This book, originally published in 1947, the year Leo died, includes his reminiscences and estimates of Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, and Renoir, among others, as well as his considered views on the place of art and literature in everyday life.

Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose

Stein, Leo

History & Criticism

University Of Nebraska Press

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Books by Wineapple, Brenda