<DIV><p>What constitutes literary genius? This collection of essays focuses on twenty-five English-language writers whose original and enduring works enrich our lives. Renowned portraitist Barry Moser provides a handsome engraving of each writer, together with illustrations based upon their texts.</p> <p>Contents:<BR>1. Tom Shippey on Geoffrey Chaucer <BR>2. Lois Potter on William Shakespeare<BR>3. Reynolds Price on John Milton<BR>4. Anthony Hecht on Alexander Pope<BR>5. David Bromwich on Samuel Johnson<BR>6. David Womersley on Edward Gibbon<BR>7. Dan Jacobson on William Wordsworth<BR>8. Hilary Mantel on Jane Austen<BR>9. Frederick Raphael on William Hazlitt<BR>10. Evan Boland on John Keats<BR>11. Daniel Mark Epstein on Nathaniel Hawthorne<BR>12. A. N. Wilson on Charles Dickens<BR>13. Justin Kaplan on Walt Whitman<BR>14. William Pritchard on Herman Melville<BR>15. Paula Marantz Cohen on George Eliot<BR>16. Bruce Floyd on Emily Dickinson<BR>17. David Carkeet on Mark Twain<BR>18. Joseph Epstein on Henry James<BR>19. Elizabeth Lowry on Joseph Conrad<BR>20. Stephen Cox on Willa Cather<BR>21. Robert Pack on Robert Frost<BR>22. Joseph Blotner on William Faulkner<BR>23. John Gross on James Joyce<BR>24. John Simon on T.S. Eliot<BR>25. James L. W. West III on Ernest Hemingway</p> <p> <b>Joseph Epstein</b>, former editor of the <I>American Scholar</I>, teaches writing and literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of seventeen books.</p> <p> <b>Barry Moser</b> is world-renowned for his children&rsquo;s illustrations, engravings, watercolors, and reinterpretations of the classics.</p></DIV>