Books by Daniel Hoffman

Accepting an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Daniel Hoffman wrote, "Amid private sufferings and outrage at the brutalities of public life, it is gaiety that sustains us, and love, and the imagination's power to create from both deprivation and delight." This collection embodies those emotions and that imaginative power.

For sixty years Daniel Hoffman has drawn on a lifetime of experiences to engage readers with his powerful imagination. The poems in Next to Last Words - illuminated by the poet's unique vision and leavened by touches of humour - continue this tradition.

Daniel Hoffman's bold new readings reveal unsuspected dimensions in Faulkner's The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. He shows how these works, often regarded as disunified collections of short stories and novellas, are coherent and successful experiments in novelistic form.

When Daniel Hoffman published a brief volume of selected poems in England, the Times Literary Supplement praised "his zestful verbal performance, supple use of rhyme and other sound effects". That same vitality inform Hang-Gliding from Helicon, which presents more than forty new poems and a selection from six of Hoffman's previous books.

In this work, first published in 1961, Hoffman combines the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville and Twain. In a new preface, he describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.

A modern long poem, focusing on William Penn, Quaker origins of American ideals, and subsequent history, Native American and European American.