John Seelye Books

Edgar Allan Poe’s gift for the macabre–his genius in finding the strangeness lurking at the heart of things–was so extraordinary that he exerted a major influence on Baudelaire and French symbolism, on Freudian analysis, and also on the detective novel and the Hollywood movie. His psychologically profound stories of encounters with the marvelous, the uncanny, and the dreadful represent–in contrast to the optimism of writers like Emerson and Whitman–the other, darker side of the nineteenth-century American sensibility. (Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) are world famous animal stories.

The literature of the "Old" West is very old indeed, but stories from the region began to appear only after the Civil War, as the short story emerged as a major literary form and the West emerged as a seperate, distinctly American culture. This collection brings together fifty of the best stories of the Old West by some of America's finest writers. From comic tales about California charlatans and prostitutes with hearts of gold to portrayals of tough, taciturn, and honorable cowboys and heroic cavalrymen; from razor-sharp stories of settlers struggling to survive in a savage land to the rare, sympathetic vision of American Indian culture, this is an indispensable collection of stories from an Old West always partly geographical, partly imagined.

Young Jody Tiflin is growing up in California during the Depression. His love for the red pony, Gabilan, changes his life completely. He becomes wiser, but also sadder, as he tries to understand the mysteries of life. One of the greatest American writers, Steinbeck's simple style evokes a strong feeling for place and people in The Red Pony.