In 1865, twenty-three-year-old William James began his studies at the Harvard Medical School. When he learned that one of his most esteemed professors, Louis Agassiz, then director of the recently established Museum of Comparative Zoology, was preparing a research expedition to Brazil, James offered his services as a voluntary collector. Over the course of a year, James kept a diary, wrote letters to his family, and sketched the plants, animals, and people he observed. During this journey, James spent time primarily in Rio de Janeiro, Belem, and Manaus, and along the rivers and tributaries of the Amazon Basin.

This volume is a critical, bilingual (English-Portuguese) edition of William James's diaries and letters and also includes reproductions of his drawings. This original material belongs to the Houghton Archives at Harvard University and is of great interest to both William James scholars and Brazilian studies experts.

Mária Mádi (1898–1970) was a Roman Catholic Hungarian physician living in Budapest during World War II. Stuck in the city, she vowed to become a witness to events as they unfolded and began keeping a diary to chronicle her everyday life, as well as the lives of her Jewish neighbors, during what would be the darkest periods of the Holocaust. From the time Hungary declared war on the United States in December 1941 until she secured an immigrant’s visa to the US in late 1946, she wrote nearly daily in English, offering current-day readers one of the most complete pictures of ordinary life during the Holocaust in Hungary. In the form of letters to her American relatives, Mádi addressed a wide range of subjects, from the fate of small countries like Hungary caught between the major powers of Germany and the Soviet Union, to the Nazi pogrom against Budapest’s Jews, to family news and the price of food.

Mádi’s family donated the entire collection of her diaries to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This edition transcribes a selection of Mádi’s writings focusing on the period of March 1944 to November 1945, from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary, through the Battle of Budapest, to the ensuing Soviet occupation. While bearing witness to the catastrophe in Hungary, Mádi hid a Jewish family in her small flat from October 1944 to February 1945. She received a posthumous Righteous among Nations Medal from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Editorial commentary by James W. Oberly situates Mádi’s observations, and a critical introduction by the Holocaust scholar András Lénárt outlines the wider sociopolitical context in which her diaries gain meaning.

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The final volume of this splendid edition contains a comprehensive index to the contents of the preceding volumes—the several thousand letters, the journals, the notes and biographical sketches. The index is prefaced by a generous selection of Byron’s aphorisms, bons mots, and memorable statements, culled by Leslie Marchand from the letters and journals and arranged under subject headings.

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The ninth volume in Leslie Marchand’s highly acclaimed, unexpurgated edition of Byron’s letters finds the poet in Pisa with Teresa Guiccioli. His unique journal, “Detached Thoughts,” is finished shortly after his arrival in November 1821, and he is drawn into Shelley’s circle (including Edward Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and later Trelawny). His letters to Mary Shelley, the Hunts, and Trelawny after the death of Shelley are especially moving. Another tragedy, the death of his daughter Allegra, leaves him deeply affected, and he refers to it time and time again.

Money problems continue to plague him, as do suspicions surrounding his political activities. Following a fracas with a half-drunken dragoon and the imprisonment of two of his servants because of it, Byron is forced to leave Pisa and install himself and Teresa in a villa near Leghorn. His correspondence with his publisher reveals increasing displeasure with Murray’s delays, indecision, and anxiety over Don Juan, and Byron finally breaks off the relationship. But his output of verse is in no way lessened, and by the end of this volume in 1822, he has finished six more cantos for Don Juan as well as other poems.

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

Born for Opposition opens with Byron in Ravenna, in 1821. His passion for the Countess Guiccioli is subsiding into playful fondness, and he confesses to his sister Augusta that he is not “so furiously in love as at first.” Italy, meanwhile, is afire with the revolutionary activities of the Carbonari, which Byron sees as “the very poetry of politics.” His journal, written while the insurrection grew, is a remarkable record of his reading and reflections while awaiting the sounds of gunfire. In spite of the turmoil, Byron stuck fast to his work. By the end of this volume, in October 1821, he is established in Pisa, having written Sardanapalus, Cain, and The Vision of Judgement.

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The third volume starts with Byron at the first crest of his fame following the publication of Childe Harold. It includes his literary letters to Tom Moore, frank and intimate ones to Hobhouse, pungent ones to Hanson and Murray, and his lively and amusing missives to Lady Melbourne, his confidante through all his love affairs. To her he describes the backwash of his tempestuous affair with Caroline Lamb, his emotional crises with Lady Oxford, the beginning of his liaison with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and his flirtation with Lady Frances Webster. The volume contains the letters of 1813 and the journal of 1813–1814, the first of his five incomparable journals.

The letters display, as Martin Fagg puts it, a “bewitching amalgam of the picturesque and the earthy, of arrogance and modesty, of vituperation and tenderness, of soulfulness and sheer irresistible high spirits.” They confirm Max Beerbohm’s opinion, “Byron’s letters are, I think, the best ever written—the fullest and most spontaneous.”

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

The first volume of Byron’s letters and journals covers his early years and includes his first pilgrimage to Greece and to the East, ending with his last letter from Constantinople on July 4, 1810, before his departure for Athens. Here is the direct record of his rapid development from the serious schoolboy to the facetious youth with ambivalent reactions to his perplexed mother, and the maturing man of extraordinary perceptions and sympathies and friendships. By the end of this volume he has already written English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (in part a spirited reaction to the reception of his earliest published work) and the first two Cantos of Childe Harold (published in 1812), which was to make him famous.