Anthracite Country (poems) (1982)
Town Life (poems) (1988)
House of Days (poems) (1998)
The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (poems) (2005)

Theodore Roethke, an American Romantic (1979)
An Invitation to Poetry (1986)
A Vermont Christmas (1988)
Gore Vidal Writer Against the Grain (1992) (see Gore Vidal)
John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994) (see John Steinbeck)
Some Necessary Angels (1997)
The Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999)
Robert Frost: A Life (1999)
The Art of Teaching (2004)
Anthony Quinn's Eye: A Lifetime of Creating and Collecting Art (2004) (with Donald Kuspit and Tom Roberts)
One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2005) (see William Faulkner)
Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2007)
Why Poetry Matters (2008)
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (2008) (with Gore Vidal)