What constitutes literary genius? This collection of essays focuses on twenty-five English-language writers whose original and enduring works enrich our lives. Renowned portraitist Barry Moser provides a handsome engraving of each writer, together with illustrations based upon their texts. Contents:1. Tom Shippey on Geoffrey Chaucer 2. Lois Potter on William Shakespeare3. Reynolds Price on John Milton4. Anthony Hecht on Alexander Pope5. David Bromwich on Samuel Johnson6. David Womersley on Edward Gibbon7. Dan Jacobson on William Wordsworth8. Hilary Mantel on Jane Austen9. Frederick Raphael on William Hazlitt10. Evan Boland on John Keats11. Daniel Mark Epstein on Nathaniel Hawthorne12. A. N. Wilson on Charles Dickens13. Justin Kaplan on Walt Whitman14. William Pritchard on Herman Melville15. Paula Marantz Cohen on George Eliot16. Bruce Floyd on Emily Dickinson17. David Carkeet on Mark Twain18. Joseph Epstein on Henry James19. Elizabeth Lowry on Joseph Conrad20. Stephen Cox on Willa Cather21. Robert Pack on Robert Frost22. Joseph Blotner on William Faulkner23. John Gross on James Joyce24. John Simon on T.S. Eliot25. James L. W. West III on Ernest Hemingway Joseph Epstein, former editor of the American Scholar, teaches writing and literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of seventeen books. Barry Moser is world-renowned for his children's illustrations, engravings, watercolors, and reinterpretations of the classics.