A classic reference work for more than sixty years, Masterplots analyzes the most important works in all genres -- long fiction, short fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction -- throughout history and around the world, helping to define and critique the literary canon. Salem's most popular title, Masterplots, is being revised for the first time since 1996. Masterplots, Fourth Edition is an expanded and updated version of 1996's Masterplots, Third Edition...

John Updike's sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading "General Considerations," books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces--reminiscences, friendly forewords,...

In The Roman Way, Edith Hamilton shows us Rome through the eyes of the Romans. Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Augustus come to life in their ambitions, their work, their loves and hates. In them we see reflected a picture of Roman life very different form that fixed in our minds through schoolroom days-and far livelier. Here, Hamilton makes vividly interesting the contrast between Roman and Greek culture. Moreover,...