W W Norton Company: 2441 books

An illuminating portrait of the nation's earliest—and most passionate—advocate for the total separation of church and state. A classic of its kind, Edmund S. Morgan's Roger Williams skillfully depicts the intellectual life of the man who, after his expulsion in 1635 from the Massachusetts...

The long-awaited biography of the frontier Founding Father whose heroic actions and neglected writings inspired an entire generation from Paine to Madison. On May 10, 1775, in the storm-tossed hours after midnight, Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary firebrand, was poised for attack. With only two...

**A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year "This book resees its subject with rare clarity and power as a painter for the 21st century." —Hilary Spurling, New York Times Book Review** Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610)...

“A deeply felt, vivacious and wonderfully illustrated biography.” —Clancy Sigal, Los Angeles Times Book Review A self-described “desert rat” who rocketed to fame at the age of twenty-two, Bill Mauldin used flashing black brush lines and sardonic captions to capture the world of the...

"The definitive life of O'Keeffe." —Hilton Kramer, Los Angeles Times Georgia O'Keefe (1887?-1986) was one of the most successful American artists of the twentieth century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes, and stark white cow skulls...

"The best biography of Picasso."—Kenneth Clark Patrick O'Brian's outstanding biography of Picasso is here available in paperback for the first time. It is the most comprehensive yet written, and the only biography fully to appreciate the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's...

Winner of the 2016 Marfield Prize In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke—then a struggling poet in Germany—went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal...

“[Beethoven’s] music never grows old— and, enjoyed alongside Mr. Lockwood’s expert commentary, it sparkles with fresh magic.”—Wall Street Journal More than any other composer, Beethoven left to posterity a vast body of material that documents the early stages of almost everything...

“Extraordinary. . . . This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times David Hare has long been one of Britain’s best-known screenwriters and dramatists. He’s the author of more than thirty acclaimed plays that have appeared on Broadway, in the...

"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape...

The definitive biography of one of the most brilliant and influential financial minds—banker, essayist, and editor of the Economist. During the upheavals of 2007–09, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man...

A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst...

An homage to the West and to two great writers who set the standard for all who celebrate and defend it. Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts...

"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration." —Dan Cryer, Newsday Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's),...