Frank Carlson Library

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls--the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser--the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House...

What many readers don't know is that Woods's very own life was filled with similar stories of adventure. Born in Georgia, Woods worked in advertising in New York, served in the US Air Force, and had a short stint as an advance man. At the age of 37, he found himself in a transatlantic sailing race, and pursued writing as a full-time career shortly thereafter. Along the way, Woods has lived all over the world, from New York to London, Santa Fe to Ireland....

The celebrated author of mystery stories set in the American Southwest offers a memoir that touches on family, war, the Depression, and the life of a writer.

The author of "Lonesome Dove" and "Rhino Ranch" reflects on the writing life, in a book that includes anecdotes, gossip and observations about writing, writers and the author himself.

Covers the life of the famed nineteenth-century author from his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, through his careers.

Will James' cowboy autobiography Lone Cowboy tells how a little boy, hardly more than a baby, becomes an orphan in the West; how an old French trapper, whom the boy calls Bopy, adopts him and takes him on his long, long hunts; how when he is hardly more than a little boy Bopy is lost in an icy river and the child, heartbroken, rides down into the prairie region alone-on his own. James gives a complete and varied idea of how a cowboy lives. This...

For the first time, the author of such classics as "Legends of the Fall" has put pen to paper to write about his own life--a life that is the root of his wonderful fiction, and which he captures with a riveting directness and a delightful, peculiar music.

"In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family,...

The beloved author of A Wrinkle in Time takes an introspective look at her life and muses on creativity in this memoir, the first of her Crosswicks Journals. Every so often I need OUT. . . . My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings. . . . I sit there, dangling my legs and looking through the foliage at the sky reflected in the water, and things slowly come back into perspective....

Scratched is an intimate account of the uses a child, and the adult she becomes, will find for perfectionism and the role it will play in every part of her life. Elizabeth Tallent's story begins in a hospital in mid-1950s suburban Washington, D.C., when her mother refuses to hold her newborn daughter, shocking behavior that baffles the nurses. Imagining her own mother's perfectionist ideal at this critical moment, Elizabeth moves back and forth in...