Most Popular Books by John Seelye

Owen Wister''s powerful story of the silent stranger who rides into the uncivilized West and defeats the forces of evil embodies one of the most enduring themes in American mythology. Set in the vast Wyoming territory, The Virginian (1902) captures both the grandeur and the loneliness of the frontier experience, brilliantly evoking the tension between the romantic freedom of the great, untamed landscape and mankind''s deep-seated desire for community and social order. Wister brings to life the honesty and rough justice that ruled the range and the civilizing influence of determined women in frontier settlements that imposed a sense of society on an unruly population. For Wister, the West tested a man''s true worth. His hero-influenced by those of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper-is a man who lives by the classic code of chivalry, ruled by quiet courage and a deeply felt sense of honor.

Jane Eyre''s American Daughters is about the influence of Charlotte Bronte''s romance on North American writers, including Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, Martha Finley, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Jean Webster, Eleanor Porter, and L M Montgomery. John Seelye demonstrates that the reception of Bronte''s Gothic romance in America was filtered through Elizabeth Gaskell''s biography of the author, published shortly after her friend''s death in 1855. A sentimental classic in its day, Gaskell''s book promoted an image of Charlotte as a long-suffering creative genius with high moral standards. Her biography necessarily overlooked Bronte''s obsessive love for her Belgian professor. Constantin Heger, an older and married man. Though Heger did not return Charlotte''s affection, he was the model for the lovers in Bronte''s novels, including the passionate, adulterous Edward Rochester, who inspired censorious reviews questioning the moral character of the author when Jane Eyre was published in 1847, a reputation that Gaskell''s biography successfully countered.

The second volume in Seelye''s series on the rivers of America in the American imagination, Beautiful Machine explores a critical, transitional period in American history, taking as its starting point the French and Indian War -- the event that determined domination of North America by an Anglo-American presence -- and ending with the opening of the Erie Canal -- the event that determined the geopolitical alignment that would guarantee a northeastern hegemony as the new nation moved West. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson figure prominently as visionaries, who saw American rivers as agents of national unity with the promise of linking Virginia''s Potomac to the wealth of the Ohio Valley. - Jacket flap.

Shows that out of the attempts of colonial writers to give symbolic form to the river-centered landscape metaphoric patterns emerged which endured on American literature.

Mark Twain has always been one of the most familiar faces in American literature. Samuel L. Clemens insisted on being photographed, and this book includes many photographs of the old man in his white suit, smoking his cigar, at his home in Hartford, on vacation in Bermuda and elsewhere, just as he was.-- adapted from dust jacket flap.

An analysis of the beginnings of American imperial rhetoric; This is a study of the early writings of Richard Harding Davis, the premier American journalist of the 1890s, best remembered for his coverage of the Spanish-American War. The emphasis of the book is on Davis''s reporting - including several volumes of travel writing, covering trips to the Near East and South and Central America. Some account is also made of his fiction, most especially Soldiers of Fortune (1897), which critics have seen as a romantic treatment of the imperialist elan. As such, the novel serves as a prolegomenon to the war in Cuba, which Davis covered during its insurrectionist stage. He later accompanied Theodore Roosevelt''s Rough Riders when U.S. forces invaded the island in 1898, an action he had urged and may have in part inspired. John Seelye argues that Davis, rather than supporting the notion of an American empire on the Roman or British plan, advocated what would become U.S. strategy over the next century: a limited engagement in support of embryonic democratic movements in the Caribbean, followed by withdrawal of armed forces once a stable government had been established. While approving British m

An astute and ambitious lad climbs the wheel of fortune while evading the mishaps that befall his crooked and luckless colleagues.