Published in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon. A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was consumed as avidly by readers as it was condemned by critics and the clergy. Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel's setting, characters, and incidents

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"The sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels and their century-long hold on the American imagination. Starting with the Civil War and cartoonist Thomas Nast, creator of the lasting images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus, author Jeremy Dauber whizzes readers through comics' progress in the twentieth century and beyond: from the golden age of newspaper comic strips (Krazy Kat, Yellow Kid, Dick Tracy) to the midcentury superhero boom...

Peter Conn's critically acclaimed biography retrieves from the footnotes of literary and cultural history one of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, winner of a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature and an active social and political campaigner.