[Steinbecks Typewriter: Essays on His Art] collects several of DeMotts finest essays on Steinbeck... [that are] so carefully revised as to warn other critics seeking their own collected essay volume of the difference between a genuinely lapidary compilation and a kitchen midden. Illustrated with some rare photos, this collection is especially notable... John Ditsky, Choice ...Steinbecks Typewriter... stands as the most in-depth treatment of Steinbecks aesthetics, particularly in its exploration of the authors interior spaces and creative habits, elements of Steinbecks artistry which have not only been underestimated but woefully ignored. Stephen George, Steinbeck Review

Perhaps the most American of American classics, The Grapes of Wrath follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation during the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s. It is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California.

In Steinbeck’s Imaginarium, Robert DeMott delves into the imaginative, creative, and sometimes neglected aspects of John Steinbeck's writing. DeMott positions Steinbeck as a prophetic voice for today as much as he was for the Depression-era 1930s as the essays explore the often unknown or unacknowledged elements of Steinbeck’s artistic career that deserve closer attention. He writes about the determining scientific influences, such as quantum physics and ecology, in Cannery Row and considers Steinbeck’s addiction to writing through the lens of the extensive, obsessive full-length journals that he kept while writing three of his best-known novels—The Grapes of Wrath, The Wayward Bus, and East of Eden. DeMott insists that these monumental works of fiction all comprise important statements on his creative process and his theory of fiction writing. DeMott further blends his personal experience as a lifelong angler with a reading of several neglected fishing episodes in Steinbeck’s work. Collectively, the chapters illuminate John Steinbeck as a fully conscious, self-aware, literate, experimental novelist whose talents will continue to warrant study and admiration for years to come.

The Library of American completes its authoritative four-volume John Steinbeck edition with this collection of the later works of an American master. It includes "The Wayward Bus," published in 1947 and spans his works through his last published book, 1962Us "Travels with Charley."

“From the very first, it seems, fishing was a respite and a therapy along with all of its other potentially redemptive qualities.” —Robert DeMott Spanning more than forty-five years, Angling Days is a collection of Robert DeMott’s numerous journal entries, each a small essay in itself, jotted down during the placid moments of fishing in and along the streams and rivers of North America. Through his journaling, DeMott carries on the angling tradition of channeling the tranquility of fly fishing into creative endeavors, whether by painting, sketching, fly tying, or writing. For him, it was writing—something he did whenever he could, whether in the midst of fishing or during a break away from the water. Angling Days is a lifetime of work, a chronicle of what it is to be an angler seeking the most pristine waters and the smartest fish. It is a collection of entries and musings in the vein of DeMott’s literary hero, Henry David Thoreau, and promises to shine a new light on the art and joy of fly fishing.

Each of these hybrid "proems," inspired in part by Audubon's great book, attempts to combine the amplitude and spaciousness of prose with the compression and focus of poetry. In traveling into darkly intertwined spaces of personal geography, memory, emotion, and loss, as well as into wild nature, each piece surrounds its lyrical moment in a context of details, imaginings, and resonances with which to express its dramatic occasion.

Poetry. "Jerry Roscoe is a poet of the American commonplace. I wanted to say - full of 'generic pleasures' (his words) about those old neighborhoods, the last haircut from Louie and the women who traveled too quickly by - but his framework is a setup, a carefully crafted fuse that burns toward unsettling surprises. MIRROR LAKE launched me into a place that I almost forgot to remember and be thankful for. Read and enjoy; you'll know yourself better for it" - George Myers Jr. "Bob DeMott's poems achieve what is to me one of the most important accomplishments any poet can offer. Their style, which is straightforward and conversational -- with figurative language gracefully and humbly eased in - is almost always transparent: We are invited to read through the screen of the words into the poem without being dragged back to the surface of the page by stylistic and graphic peculiarities. This is a reader's poetry, inviting, heartfelt, generous and moving" - Ted Kooser.