From the big woods of Wisconsin to the Indian country of the Great Plains, new adventures and landscapes filled the rich childhood of Laura Ingalls Wilder. On a frontier steeped in both danger and great possibility, Laura would grow up to witness firsthand the rapid transformation of the West as pioneers and covered wagons gave way to farms, towns, and railroads. A pioneer, teacher, farmer's wife, and storyteller, Laura Ingalls Wilder experienced one of the most exciting times in American history.

Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.

This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Muir, the rugged individualist and passionate protector of the wild who saw that the encroachment of civilization into nature would threaten civilization itself.

The number one New York Times best seller by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important chapter in the American story that's "as resonant today as ever" (The Wall Street Journal) - the settling of the Northwest Territory by courageous pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would define our country.

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.

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.

Lark Rise is Flora Thompson's childhood memories of a north Oxfordshire village, the people who lived and worked in it, and a way of life that has totally disappeared. The story is built around Laura and her brother Edmund, through whose eyes are seen 'old Sally', whose grandfather built the house she lived in before the enclosure of the heathland, children's games, the interaction of village and gentry, and the way in which the seasons governed life.

Anna is distraught when her beloved mother, Ines, passes away. She inherits a box of papers, handwritten in Italian and yellowed with age, and a tantalizing promise that the truth about what happened during the war lies within. The diaries lead Anna to the small village of Rofelle, where she slowly starts to heal as she explores sun-kissed olive groves, and pieces together her mother’s past: happy days spent herding sheep across Tuscan meadows cruelly interrupted when World War Two erupted and the Nazis arrived....

In 1954, 63-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home. Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow.

In 1889, satirist Jerome K. Jerome fully intended to write a serious travel guide when he and his two best friends embarked on a boating trip up the river Thames to Oxford. But his musings on landmarks and local history were soon hijacked by his own digressive, waggish voice. And so, what began as a peaceful and edifying two-week exploration soon floated upriver into farce - aided, quite naturally, by a portly ration of cheese, some very bad weather, and a dog named Montmorency.

In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world’s greatest living ice navigator. The expedition’s visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame. Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again.

The extraordinary life of history's first modern lesbian who inspired the television series Gentleman Jack. Anne Lister's journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was a Regency landowner, an intrepid world traveller...and an unabashed lover of other women. In this bold new biography, prizewinning author Angela Steidele uses the diaries to create a portrait of Anne Lister as we've never seen her before: a woman in some ways very much of her time and in others far ahead of it.

The tragedy of the Donner party constitutes one of the most amazing stories of the American West. In 1846, 87 people, men, women, and children, set out for California, persuaded to attempt a new overland route. After struggling across the desert, losing many oxen, and nearly dying of thirst, they reached the very summit of the Sierras, only to be trapped by blinding snow and bitter storms. Many perished; some survived by resorting to cannibalism; all were subjected to unbearable suffering.

In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times. For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman", the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country?

Classic Christmas Stories features seven timeless classics, including Twas the Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore, A Christmas Dream and How it Came True by Louisa May Alcott, A Christmas Inspiration by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, A Kidnapped Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, and The Three Kings by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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.

In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman - who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband - conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished.

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.

Major Robert Kurland has returned to the quiet vistas of Kurland St. Mary to recuperate from the horrors of Waterloo. However injured his body may be, his mind is as active as ever. Too active, perhaps. When he glimpses a shadowy figure from his bedroom window struggling with a heavy load, the tranquil façade of the village begins to loom sinister....

A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt. The unvarnished tale of this mass migration is always striking, revealing the amazing truth of what people will do for a chance to be rich.

The number one New York Times best seller by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important chapter in the American story that's "as resonant today as ever" (The Wall Street Journal) - the settling of the Northwest Territory by courageous pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would define our country.

These are the valiant and lyrically descriptive letters, written in 1873, by Isabella Bird, a courageous and spirited Englishwoman, telling her sister of her adventures on horseback over 800 miles of American wilderness.

Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader is a frontier classic by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, a widowed young mother who accepted an offer to assist with a ranch in Wyoming. In Stewart's delightful collection of letters, she describes her homesteading experiences to her former employer, Mrs. Coney.

In April of 1846, 21-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and 14 others set out for California on snowshoes and over the next 32 days endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.

Raised in post-Revolution Granville, Massachusetts, James Gould could only imagine the beauty and warmth of the lands to the south. It was there that he longed to build bridges and lighthouses from his very own designs and plans. His gripping story unfolds as Gould follows his dream to the raw settlement of Bangor on the Penobscot River, St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, lawless Spanish East Florida, and back - at last and finally - to St. Simons.

This essay by Thoreau first published in 1849, argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule their consciences. It goes on to say that individuals have a duty to avoid allowing the government to make them the agents of injustice. The quote: "That government is best which governs least," sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, actually was first found in this essay. Thoreaus' thoughts were motivated by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War but they are still relevant and resonate today.

Henry David Thoreau has long been an intellectual icon and folk hero. In this strikingly original profile, Michael Sims reveals how the bookish, quirky young man evolved into the patron saint of environmentalism and nonviolent activism. Working from 19th-century letters and diaries, Sims charts Henry’s course from his time at Harvard through the years he spent living in a cabin beside Walden Pond. Sims uncovers a previously hidden Thoreau - the rowdy boy reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, the sarcastic college iconoclast, the devoted son who kept imitating his beloved older brother’s choices in life.

In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world’s greatest living ice navigator. The expedition’s visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame. Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again.