Henry Buhl Library: American Literature: Find Author Information

Find Books & eBooks

Highlighted Video Series:

Voices in Black and White: The History of Modern Southern Literature
Call Number: DVD 3123 - 3125
The series contains three parts: 1. Tell about the South [1915-1940] -- 2. Prophets and poets [1941-1962] -- 3. Let freedom ring [1963 to the new century].

Search for author as the Subject.

When your topic is the author, they become the subject (see below).

Search the Notes.

Searches the table of contents of anthologies of literature and criticism.

Screengrab of Henry Advanced Search of Mark Twain as the Subject.

Need a book the library does not own?

You can request the book through Interlibrary Loan. Info and a downloadable form are available here!

To search for books available in other libraries, try using

WorldCat -- Search the holdings of more than 10,000 libraries to locate books and identify citation information.

Library of Congress -- Access to the Library of Congress catalog and other online collections.

NOTE: Users do not need to identify a library that owns the book. Simply provide the appropriate information on the form and library staff will do the rest!

eBook Collections

Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online (Gale Literature) This link opens in a new window
Signed essays written by scholars provide essential context for understanding the careers and writings of more than 12,000 authors from all time periods and from all parts of the world.
Twayne's Authors Series (Gale Literature) This link opens in a new window
In addition to providing American, British, and world literary criticism, each title includes a chapter or more about the life of the author.
Literary Reference Source Plus This link opens in a new window
Learn more about an American author(s) with the reference works, biographies, and interviews available here.
Salem Literature Online This link opens in a new window
Contains "the Critical Insights" series, which focuses on an individual author’s entire body of work or on a single work of literature. Each book includes a small biography.
American National Biography This link opens in a new window
Contains over 19,000 biographies of significant, influential, or notorious figures from American history written by prominent scholars. The American National Biography (ANB) is the successor to The Dictionary of American Biography (DAB).

Ebsco E-Books
Access to over 200,000 full text eBooks across a variety of subjects.

Outstanding Websites

Dickinson Electronic Archives
Access correspondence by Dickinson, writings from her family, responses to her writing, a bibliography, and resources for teachers.
The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Archive
This site includes "the manuscripts of The Domain of Arnheim, The Spectacles, and some of Poe's most famous poems," as well as "correspondence, books belonging to Poe (including the author's annotated copies of several works), and a large group of sheet music for songs based on Poe's poetry."
The Hemingway Papers
A growing collection of columns written by Ernest Hemingway, as well as featured stories written about Hemingway, and published in the Toronto Star. All documents are available from the Toronto Star archives.
The Walker Percy Project
"The Walker Percy Project, freely accessible to Percy students, general readers, and scholars over the web, is a comprehensive educational resource on the important late-20th century American novelist and philosopher it treats as its subject. "
The Walt Whitman Archive
"an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers."
The Willa Cather Archive
Read writings, letters, and some biographies of Willa Cather through this archive. Users can also access issues of Cather Studies and use the TokenX tool to analyze Cather's work(s).
The William Blake Archive
Access multiple editions of digitized works by Blake, a biography of Blake, and an extensive bibliography of resources for further study (from the Library of Congress UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Rochester, and the National Endowment for the Humanities).
William Faulkner on the Web
Includes resources for the study of Faulkner and his works, including plot summaries, commentary, select bibliographies, information about Faulkner's screenplays and film adaptations of his writings, and links to other quality resources on the web.