William Saroyan …

In “Turn Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday,” the Pulitzer prize-winning playright ( The Time of four Life ), novelist, and short-story writer revisits his hometown of Fresno, California, through a cache of recently discovered photographs of the town as Saroyan knew it in the teens and twenties.

Emily Hahn …

This celebrated journalist, novelist, and biographer has written about everything from China to Leonardo da Vinci. She now turns her talents to a subject much in the news today: gold—specifically, a great treasure salvaged from the sea off Cape Canaveral, Florida, detritus from the wreck of a great Spanish fleet in 1715.

Justin Kaplan…

In an excerpt from his forthcoming biography of Walt Whitman, Kaplan—whose Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain received the Pulitzer prize in 1967—examines with compassion and perception the curious friendship between the brash young poet and the aging Ralph Waldo Emerson, the genteel dean of nineteenth-century American letters.

Plus …

C. Vann Woodward on the diaries of Mary Chestnut; Ray Alien Billington on the uses of local history; John Garraty on the history of the ever-higher cost of living; the pathetic fate of murderess Ruth Snyder; a memoir of the Civil War battle of Fort Fisher—written by a black chaplain in the Union Army; an election-day portfolio presented by Marshall B. Davidson; and much more, all of it profusely illustrated …