In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Love, Lucy is the valentine Lucille Ball left for her fans—a warm, wise, and witty memoir written by Lucy herself. The legendary star of the classic sitcom I Love Lucy was at the pinnacle of her success when she sat down to record the story of her life. No comedienne had made America laugh so hard, no television actress had made the leap from radio and B movies to become one of the world’s best-loved performers. This is her story—in her own words.

The best-selling author of Truman and John Adams, David McCullough has written profiles of exceptional men and women past and present who have not only shaped the course of history or changed how we see the world but whose stories express much that is timeless about the human condition. Here are Alexander von Humboldt, whose epic explorations of South America surpassed the Lewis and Clark expedition; Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the little woman who made the big war”....

Winner of the 1982 National Book Award for Biography, Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as a masterpiece by Newsday, it is the story of a remarkable little boy -- seriously handicapped by recurrent and nearly fatal attacks of asthma -- and his struggle to manhood.

Willa Cather renders the tough inner terrain of a man in mid-life crisis. Bartley Alexander is a master bridge engineer. At 43 he is at the height of his power, comfortable with success and all it brings. Yet he yearns for the lost vibrancy of his youth. He leads a double life, veering between his beautiful, accomplished wife and his mistress, an actress he knew as a student in Paris. The conflict creates a crack in the structure of his life that ultimately undermines him.

In the tradition of The Boys in the Boat and Seabiscuit, a fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking but forgotten figure - the remarkable Major Taylor, the Black man who broke racial barriers by becoming the world’s fastest and most famous bicyclist at the height of the Jim Crow era.

As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California's early oil industry. Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption, and class warfare, featuring a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist.

Millions have sat under the “big top,” watching as trapeze artists glide and clowns entertain, but few know the captivating stories behind the men whose creativity, ingenuity, and determination created one of our country’s most beloved pastimes. In Battle for the Big Top, New York Times best-selling author Les Standiford brings to life a remarkable era when three circus kings - James Bailey, P. T. Barnum, and John Ringling - all vied for control of the vastly profitable and influential American Circus.

The year is 1910. Nate Cooper is an old-school cowboy. He sees the change brought by the turn of the century and reckons none of it to be good. Even after spending nearly 30 years in a Montana prison for a wrongful murder conviction, Nate’s moral compass is true and unwavering: He does all the wrong things for all the right reasons. So when he returns to his northern Montana ranching town to find the Blackfoot Indians - the people he went to prison trying to defend - are still being cheated out of their territory by ranchers, Nate can’t rest on his laurels.

Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, tells a gripping story in Barnum, one that’s imbued with the same buoyant spirit as the man himself. Wilson adeptly makes the case for P. T. Barnum’s place among the icons of American history, as a figure who represented, and indeed created, a distinctly American sense of optimism, industriousness, humor, and relentless energy.

The horse Jim was known as Beautiful Jim Key from the moment he stepped into the American spotlight in 1897 at age eight until his death in 1912. This horse was beloved for his remarkable intelligence, cultivated by human kindness and patience. No less extraordinary was the man who trained Jim, Dr. William Key of Shelbyville, Tennessee, a former slave who in his life had seen horrific cruelty toward humans and animals. Bill Key was a self-schooled veterinarian and Black entrepreneur who refused to use force in any guise while breaking and training horses.

Buster Keaton (1895-1966) was a brilliant comedian and filmmaker who conceived, wrote, directed, acted, and even edited most of his ten feature films and nineteen short comedies, which are perhaps the finest silent pictures ever made. With a face of stone and a mind that engineered breathtakingly intricate moments of slapstick, Keaton has become an icon of the American cinema. Marion Meade's definitive biography explores his often brutal childhood acting experiences, the making of his masterpieces, his shame at his own lack of education, his life-threatening alcoholism, and his turbulent marriages.

In 1964, Little Big Man gave us the reminiscences of Jack Crabb - a white orphan raised among the Cheyenne - who returns to "civilized" society, where (among other things) he tangles with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, and ends up as the only white survivor of Custer's Last Stand. At the end of Little Big Man, Jack's supposed death at age 111 cut short his tale.

This is One of Ours, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Willa Cather, America’s greatest writer of the prairie heartland. It is set in rural Nebraska in the early 20th century prior to the first World War that enveloped Europe and eventually the United States. The story focuses on the young Claude Wheeler, a well-to-do farmer’s son who secretly longs for something to take him away from the hum-drum agrarian life he has inherited. As he prepares to take over his family’s farm business, war intrudes.

4 Counties: The Story of the Last King of Texas is the first novel in a series based on the runaway lifestyle of rodeo cowboy, rancher, and oilman Kenny Wayne Harris. Follow the fast track of Kenny's early life as a star high school athlete, his rodeo career, then his thrilling adventures as head of the iconic Harris Ranches, among the most famous pieces of property in the state: one of the original Republic of Texas, 300,000-acre land grants gifted by Sam Houston to each of his original Texas Rangers.

Millions have sat under the “big top,” watching as trapeze artists glide and clowns entertain, but few know the captivating stories behind the men whose creativity, ingenuity, and determination created one of our country’s most beloved pastimes. In Battle for the Big Top, New York Times best-selling author Les Standiford brings to life a remarkable era when three circus kings - James Bailey, P. T. Barnum, and John Ringling - all vied for control of the vastly profitable and influential American Circus.

In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of Smith College, left home in Auburn, New York, for the wilds of northwestern Colorado. Bored by their soci-ety luncheons, charity work, and the effete young men who courted them, they learned that two teach-ing jobs were available in a remote mountaintop schoolhouse and applied—shocking their families and friends.

Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long Dodge City's streets were lined with saloons and brothels, and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West.

The Masters golf tournament weaves a hypnotic spell. It is the toughest ticket in sports, with black-market tickets selling for $10,000 and more. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum facade of this famous Augusta course.

Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands chronicles the turbulent years Roosevelt spent as a rancher in the Badlands of Dakota Territory, following the sudden deaths on February 14, 1884, of his wife, two days after giving birth, and of his mother. Grief-stricken - and driven by doubts about his career after failed attempts as a reformer fighting political corruption -the young, Harvard-educated New York politician left his infant daughter in his sister's care and went to live on a Badlands ranch he had bought a year earlier.

The Open Range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today.

Reminiscent of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, this fascinating account from acclaimed author Jill Jonnes recaptures the 1889 Paris World's Fair. Casting vehement criticism aside, Gustave Eiffel built his tower to be the fair's centerpiece. Perched at the top all summer, he hosted a string of dignitaries.

For more than a century the life and death of Butch Cassidy have been the subject of legend, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. But who was Butch Cassidy, really? Charles Leerhsen, best-selling author of Ty Cobb, sorts out the facts from folklore and paints a “compelling portrait of the charming, debonair, ranch hand-turned-outlaw” (Ron Hansen, author of The Kid) of the American West.

Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his 47 years, he seemingly lived five lives: He traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with the guns they needed to win the Civil War. Colt lived during an age of promise and progress, but also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, and he not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it.

A biting satire that countered the American myth of wholesome small-town life with a depiction of narrow-minded provincialism, it was to some degree based on Lewis's own experience of growing on Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Set in mid-1910s, it depicts the struggles of Carol Kennicott, a city girl, as she tries to adapt to small town life, having left her librarian job and St. Paul, Minnesota to marry Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. Dismayed by the town’s drabness and the conforming, petty inhabitants, Carol optimistically sets out to improve the town.

As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California's early oil industry. Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption, and class warfare, featuring a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist.

Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the youngest of the famously witty brood that includes the writers Jessica and Nancy, who wrote when Deborah was born, "How disgusting of the poor darling to go and be a girl." Deborah's effervescent memoir chronicles her remarkable life, from an eccentric but happy childhood in the Oxfordshire countryside, to tea with Adolf Hitler and her controversially political sister Unity in 1937, to her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire.

Through most of the Roaring '20s, Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion of the world. With his fierce good looks and matchless dedication to the kill, he was a fighter perfectly suited to his time. In A Flame of Pure Fire, renowned sports writer Roger Kahn not only chronicles the thrilling, brutal bouts of the Manassa Mauler, but also illustrates how the tumultuous 1920s shaped Dempsey - and how the champ, in turn, left an indelible mark on sports and American history.

The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master John McPhee. It is divided into two parts. It is an "album quilt", an artful assortment of nonfiction writings that have not previously appeared in any book.

In the tradition of The Boys in the Boat and Seabiscuit, a fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking but forgotten figure - the remarkable Major Taylor, the Black man who broke racial barriers by becoming the world’s fastest and most famous bicyclist at the height of the Jim Crow era.