What can there possibly be left to say about . . . This common litany resonant both in and outside of academia reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthologyfor this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers many aspects of even the most wellknown authorsboth their lives and their work remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot Ralph Waldo Emerson William Faulkner Harriet Beecher Stowe Walt Whitman Ernest Hemingway Richard Wright Edith Wharton Nathaniel Hawthorne Zora Neale Hurston Henry James Willa Cather Herman Melville Edgar Allan Poe Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain.