Hardcover Fiction

by Ben Ames Williams · Houghton Mifflin

First published in 1947, this bestselling historical novel is cherished and remembered as one of the finest retellings of the Civil War saga—America's own War and Peace. In the first hard pinch of the Civil War, five siblings of an established Confederate Virginia family learn that their father is the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. The family's story, and the story of their descendants, is presented in this tale that includes both soldiers and civilians—complete with their boasting, ambition, and arrogance, but also their patience, valor, and shrewdness. The grandnephew of General James Longstreet, the author brings to life one of the most extraordinary periods in history, and details war as it really is—a disease from which, win or lose, no nation ever completely recovers.

by Marcia Davenport · Scribner

by Ross Lockridge · Houghton Mifflin

by F. Van Wyck Mason · Harper

by Frances Parkinson Keyes · Julian Messner Inc

by Mary Roberts Rinehart. · Rinehart & Company

by Gore Vidal · Dutton

In 1948, Gore Vidal was a celebrated twenty-two-year-old war novelist about to embark on a career in politics. His future seemed clear. But then he made a choice that changed his life. He published The City and the Pillar, an openly homosexual novel that was taken to be largely autobiographical. "I have read that I was too stupid at the time to know what I was doing," he notes in his introduction to this edition, "but in such matters I have always had a certain alertness. I knew that my description of the love affair between two 'normal' all-American boys, of the sort that I had spent three years in the army with during the war, would challenge every superstition about sex in my native land." His publisher hated the book. The New York Times would not advertise it. The City and the Pillar became a bestseller, nevertheless, and is now a classic. Thomas Mann called it a "noble work." The tragic story of Jim Willard's self-deluded love for another small-town American boy and the portrait of homosexual life in New York and Hollywood in the forties are still moving and truthful, as evocative and topical today as they were nearly fifty years ago. This edition incorporates Vidal's 1965 revisions and some further emendations by the author. Vidal's only collection of short stories, published as A Thirsty Evil in 1956, is also included here, bringing together for the first time his early homoerotic work. These subtle and comic tales, set in Key West, Washington, D.C., Paris, and New York, are at once sophisticated and charming, written with the narrative power for which Gore Vidal is famous.

by Neil H. Swanson · Doubleday

HISTORICAL NOVEL SET IN MARYLAND, VIRGINIA, DELAWARE AND OTHER COLONIES IN 1763.

by Agnes Sligh Turnbull · Macmillan

"Life of a young Episcopal priest in a city parish." Cf. Hanna, A. Mirror for the nation

by Thomas B. Costain · Doubleday

by Truman Capote · Random House

by Gerald Warner Brace · W.W. Norton and Company

by Angela Mackail Thirkell · Knopf

by Guy McCrone · Farrar, Straus

by Alan Paton · Scribner

Two fathers come to terms with personal loss and the emotional scars inflicted on South Africa during the era of apartheid.

by Norman Katkov · Doubleday