Questo autore ha ottenuto fama principalmente come biografo, concentrandosi su figure cardine della storia e della cultura americana. Il suo profondo interesse per gli eroi e le loro eredità emerge nei suoi ritratti acuti. In qualità di redattore generale di Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, ha dimostrato una maestria nel linguaggio e nella sua risonanza storica.
In Pocket Aristotle the author, Justin D. Kaplan brings to life selections from Aristotle. Included in this edition are the most widely read, studied, and quoted works of the great philosopher. The editor's notes give the reader a convenient and concise review of each work.
'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. Hemingway's comment is scarcely an exaggeration. While critics have argued over the symbolic significance of Huck's and Jim's voyage down the Mississippi, none has disputed the greatness of the book itself. What began modestly as 'a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer' grew under Mark Twain's hand into a work of immeasurable richness. In its distrust of too much civilisation and its concern with the way language turns dreamy and corrupt when divorced from life, it is a thoroughly modern novel. And more than modern in its hero, who is, according to T.S. Eliot, 'one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction, not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and other discoveries which man has made about itself.
Traces the lives of cousins William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV, rivals who pursued separate ambitions, built the original Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and influenced social behavior before John Jacob perished aboard the Titanic.