From antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century, friendship was one of the enduring literary subjects. By the mid-twentieth century, however, it had been relegated to the cultural attic and had become the exclusive property of pop psychology and self-help manuals. More recently, the world has turned again - there has been a resurgence of interest in the bond epitomized by one of the finest words in the English language: friend.

In this anthology of more than 270 selections, a great American writer teams up with a prominent literary critic to provide a magnificent collection of stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs that illuminate friendship in all its diversity and human complexity - across dozens of cultures and all of history.

From Homer, Aristotle, and the Bible to the short stories of Chekhov, Joyce, and Gordimer; from Shakespeare, Montainge, and Emerson to Edward Lear, Oscar Wilde, and Groucho Marx; from Frederick Douglass's meditation on friendship and slavery to Elie Wiesel's portrait of friendship in the Holocaust; from the letters of Keats and Mozart and Flaubert to the letters of Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf; from the poems of Blake, Coleridge, Whitman, and Dickinson to those of Yeats, Borges, Walcott, and Le Guin; from Dorothy Wordsworth's and Fanny Burney's diaries to Collette's comic vignette about her mother's spider friend - The Norton Book of Friendship recovers, in a full and brilliant selection, this lost tradition and returns the wonders of friendship to the center of our lives.