Biography: writers Books

Book SynopsisA New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice Winner of the New Deal Book AwardAn immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depressionand employed some of the biggest names in American lettersThe plan was as idealistic as it was audaciousand utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight statesalong with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and townswhile also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities. All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers' Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-

Read more less

Book SynopsisA New Statesman, Financial Times, Observer, and Sunday Times Book of the Year “[An] impressive examination of artistic creation.”—Alex Clark, Guardian A riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary.Trade Review"Hollis combines a poet’s sharp eye for details with a cultural historian’s grasp of atmosphere.… The richness of [his] analysis is evident on every page." -- Jason Harding - Financial Times"Hollis delves into the deep background from which The Waste Land arose.… There is genuine suspense in the air, as Hollis invites us to listen out for murmurs and rumors, in the poet’s letters of long ago." -- Anthony Lane - The New Yorker"[Matthew Hollis] creates stunning juxtapositions of context and text. A repossession of The Waste Land is the chief effect of reading his book. But the structure of the book is itself a work of art." -- Helen Vendler - Times Literary Supplement"Hollis succeeds brilliantly in bringing the literary landscape of the 1920s to life.… [He] turns a complex process of literary composition into a rattling good story. His criticism is personally engaged...and wonderfully compelling as a result." -- Tristram Fane Saunders - Sunday Telegraph"[Hollis] examines, with amazing forensic diligence, the context and fraught composition of the most famous poem of the 20th century. The clarifying light in each case is exemplary. The celebrated ‘difficulty’ of [Eliot, Pound] and their work was revealed as perhaps not so difficult at all." -- William Boyd, New Statesman, Book of the Year"[Hollis’s] quest is for all the seeds of intellectual and emotional pressure that shaped the poem. Such is the energy and engagement of Hollis in this task that you find yourself rooting for the emergence of the poem along with Eliot and his supporters, willing it into life as the book progresses.… The evolution of those pages...have become folkloric among Eliot’s readers, but still Hollis invests them with fresh life." -- Tim Adams - Observer"With elegance, wit and...warmth, [Hollis] tells the story of The Waste Land’s difficult birth.… At times the book reads, delightfully, as a group biography of modernism’s bright lights." -- Susannah Goldsborough - Times [UK]"[A] rewarding literary dive into the alchemy of a classic, from Eliot’s leap of courage to Pound’s scorched-earth battle for respect with Poetry magazine in Chicago." -- Christopher Borrelli - Chicago Tribune"[The Waste Land] brings to life the exciting, even overheated, creative environment in which the poem came into being.… Meticulously grounding his account in time and place and paying close attention to the interplay of poetic intuition and critical mind, Hollis succeeds in gripping our attention." -- Hilary Davies - Literary Review"Illuminating.… Hollis blends rich characterization and historical background to create a vivid picture of the London literary scene.… Hollis’s sharp prose sings and is poetic in its own right.… This fascinating and brilliantly researched history will delight Eliot’s fans." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"An authoritative and beautifully written account of the peculiar alchemy that produced the most influential poem of the twentieth century. This is more than the story of T. S. Eliot's genius: Matthew Hollis reveals how the forces of friendship, love, despair, madness, and ambition shaped The Waste Land. Literary history at its finest." -- Heather Clark, author of Red Comet"A great work of art takes on a life of its own. This is the strategy equally artful and assessive of Matthew Hollis's superb new study, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. The poem is brilliant, infuriating, moody, conflicted, lyrical, fractured, wildly inventive, haunted by tradition, and as full of eroticism as lament. The Waste Land helped to define modernism and lives on vividly into our present day. To tell the life story of this poem, Hollis tells the story of the poet, sometimes minute by minute, conversation by conversation. The moving result—as Whitman would say of his own sweeping poetry—is that 'who touches this [book] touches a man.'" -- David Baker, author of Whale Fall and professor of English at Denison University

Read more less

Book SynopsisEssential for understanding Patricia Highsmith’s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also “one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City” (Dwight Garner,—New York Times).Trade Review"Highsmith’s diary entries… inspire a sharp sense of suspense. They’re a social calendar written in the style of a noir, with Highsmith never failing to come off as both femme fatale and starched-shirt detective. It’s all there: the guilt of cheating and even of just existing, deadly betrayals of the heart, the growing restlessness with routine, the stranger in the bed…. There’s often a productive distance between what she needs and what she can get, what she knows herself to be capable of and what more she might be capable of in the moment of creation: a thrilling psychic chase." -- Hannah Gold - New Yorker"Thoroughly annotated introductions for each year provide helpful historical background such as the Lavender Scare, and information about the many people in Highsmith’s life . . . A great read for aspiring writers, devotees of LGBTQ history, and those who enjoy reading about an artist’s evolution." -- Library Journal"The intimate revelations of a sensuous, ambitious writer . . . Out of nearly 5,000 pages from the notebooks and diaries of Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), editor von Planta and her team have culled about 20% to represent the author’s formative years as a writer . . . As this volume demonstrates, Highsmith poured everything into her private notebooks: desires, dreams, inspirations, frustrations, and more." -- Kirkus Reviews

Read more less

Book SynopsisNational Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • National Bestseller • A brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.Hendrickson’s two strongest gifts—that compassion and his research and reporting prowess—combine to masterly effect.” —Arthur Phillips, The New York Times Book Review Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer's boorishness, depression and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capab

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe dramatic story of the legal and emotional battle that raged between two of Oscar Wilde's closest friends â both former lovers â following the playwright's death

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Real JRR Tolkien: The Man Who Created Middle Earth is a comprehensive biography of the linguist and writer; taking the reader from his formative years of home-schooling, through the spires of Oxford, to his romance with his wife-to-be on the brink of war, and onwards into his phenomenal academic success and his creation of the seminal high fantasy world of Middle Earth. "The Real JRR Tolkien" delves into his influences, places, friendships, triumphs and tragedies, with particular emphasis on how his remarkable life and loves forged the worlds of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Using contemporary sources and comprehensive research, "The Real JRR Tolkien" offers a unique insight into the life and times of one of Britain's greatest authors, from cradle to grave to legacy.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisA sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in IndiaJohn Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers-W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender-achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest's summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain's struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man's wartime loyalties would lie.Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker's The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.

Read more less

Book SynopsisClair Bee (1896-1983) was a hugely successful basketball coach at Rider College and Long Island University with a 412 and 87 record before his career was derailed in 1951 by a point-shaving scandal. In the trial that sent his star player, Sherman White, to prison, the judge excoriated Bee for creating a morally lax culture that contributed to his players' involvement with gambling. To a certain extent, Bee agreed with the judge's scolding, concluding that coaches, himself included, had become so driven to succeed on the court that they had lost sight of the educational role sports should play. His coaching career effectively over, Bee launched an effort to reform the ills he saw in college sports, and he did so in the pages of the Chip Hilton novels for young readers. He began the series in 1948, but it was the post-scandal books that he used as teaching tools. The books mirrored some of the events of the gambling scandal and were Bee's attempt to reform the problems plaguing college sports. He used his fiction to posit a better sports world that he hoped his young readers would construct and inhabit. The Chip Hilton books were extremely popular and have become a classic series, with over two million copies sold to date. Hoop Crazy is the fascinating story of Clair Bee and his star character Chip Hilton and the ways in which their lives, real and fictional, were intertwined.Trade Review[T]his book presents a truly unique look at one of the greatest and most controversial college basketball coaches—and one of the most popular authors of adolescent sports fiction—of all time."" - Journal of Sport History, Spring 2015

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis work presents a portrait of Longfellow as professional author, devoted friend, and family man. The most popular American poet of his day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was a multiculturalist before the term was invented. He passionately believed in the value of foreign travel and conceived of American literature as deeply 'transatlantic'. A polyglot poet-scholar, the first American to translate Dante's entire ""Divine Comedy"", he was also a hands-on, unconventional father who produced numerous Edward Lear - like drawings for the entertainment of his children. Based on an exhibition at Harvard's Houghton Library and originally published as a special issue of the ""Harvard Library Bulletin"", this volume offers an innovative view of the poet's personal life, his connection with his audience, and his efforts to add an international dimension to American literature. Profusely illustrated with manuscripts, drawings, and photographs from the extensive collections of Houghton Library and the Longfellow National Historic Site, it demonstrates how intensely involved Longfellow was in family, fatherhood, and friendship. It also shows how these supposedly 'private' aspects of his life constantly intersected with the more public aspects of his understanding of authorship, his collaborative projects, and his commitment to his readers. The result is a vivid introduction to Longfellow's world.Trade ReviewChristoph Irmscher demonstrates the enviable ability to select a dazzling array of material objects from another century, and use them to give shape and substance to the life and tomes of a most appealing subject. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was America's first celebrity poet - a superstar of his day, we realize here in a very immediate way - but he was also a devoted family man and a model of professionalism to an adoring public. The great Bard of Brattle Street could not have wished for a more suitable Boswell on the occasion of his two hundredth birthday. - Nicholas Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

Read more less

Book SynopsisBased on almost 200 previously unpublished letters and extensive interviews with their closest associates, Walker?s biography of Margaret Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh, offers a new look into a devoted marriage and fascinating partnership that ultimately created a Pulitzer Prize?winning novel. This edition of Walker?s biography celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gone With the Wind in 1936.In lively extracts from their letters to family and friends, John and Margaret, who also went by Peggy, describe the stormy years of their courtship, their bohemian lifestyle as a young married couple, the arduous but fulfilling years when Peggy was writing her famous novel, the thrill of its acceptance for publication and its literary success, and the excitement of the making of the movie. In telling the private side of this twenty-four-year marriage, author Marianne Walker reveals a long-suspected truth: Gone With the Wind might have never been written were it not for John Marsh. He was Peggy?s best friend and constant champion, and he became her editor, proofreader, researcher, business manager, and the inspiration and motivation behind her writing. At every point, including the turbulent years of Mitchell?s first marriage to Red Upshaw, it was John who provided the intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and editorial insights that allowed Peggy to channel her talents into the creation of her astounding Civil War epic. From years of meticulous research, Marianne Walker details the intimate and moving love story between a husband and wife, and between a writer and her editor.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn image of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) as a man of gloom and mystery continues to hold great popular appeal. Long recognized as one of the greats of American literature, he elicited either highly commendatory or absolutely hostile reactions from many who knew him, from others who claimed to comprehend him as person or as writer, and from still others who circulated as fact opinions intuited from his writings. Whether promoting him as angel or demon, 'a man of great and original genius' or 'extraordinarily wicked', the viewpoints in this dramatic collection of primary materials provide vigorous testimony to support the contradictory images of the man and the writer that have prevailed for a century and a half. Noted Poe scholar Benjamin Fisher includes a comprehensive introduction and a detailed chronology of Poe's sadly short life; each entry is introduced by a short headnote that places the selection in historical and cultural context, and explanatory notes provide information about people and places. From John Allan's letter to Secretary of War John Eaton about Poe's West Point life to John Frankenstein's hostile verse casting him as an alcoholic, from Rufus Griswold's first and second posthumous vilifications to James Russell Lowell's more sensible outline of his life and career, from scornful to commendable reviews to scathing attacks on his morals to recognition of his comic achievements, Fisher has gathered a lively array of materials that read like the most far-fetched of gothic tales. Poe himself was creative when he supplied information to others about his life and literary career, and the speculative content of many of the portrayals presented in this collection read as if their authors had set out to be equally creative. The sixty-nine recollections gathered in ""Poe in His Own Time"" form a dramatic, real-time biographical narrative designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict with each other and sometimes in agreement but always arresting.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisDuring the last months of the war, Josef Pieper saw the realization of a long-cherished plan to escape from the “lethal chaos” that was the Germany of that time, “plucked,” he writes, “as was Habakkuk, by the hair of his head . . . to be planted into a realm of the most peaceful seclusion, whose borders and exists were, of course, controlled by armed sentries.” There he made contact with a friend close-by, who possessed an amazing library, and Pieper hit upon the idea of reading the letters of Goethe from that library. Soon, however, he decided to read the entire Weimar edition of fifty volumes, which were brought to him in sequence, two or three at a time.The richness of this life revealing itself over a period of more than sixty years appeared before my gaze in its truly overpowering magnificence, which almost shattered my powers of comprehension – confined, as they had been, to the most immediate and pressing concerns. What a passionate focus on reality in all its forms, what an undying quest to chase down all that is in the world, what strength to affirm life, what ability to take part in it, what vehemence in the way he showed his dedication to it! Of course, too, what ability to limit himself to what was appropriate; what firm control in inhibiting what was purely aimless; what religious respect for the truth of being! I could not overcome my astonishment; and the prisoner entered a world without borders, a world in which the fact of being in prison was of absolutely no significance. But no matter how many astonishing things I saw in these unforgettable weeks of undisturbed inner focus, nothing was more surprising or unexpected than this: to realize how much of what was peculiar to this life occurred in carefully preserved seclusion; how much the seemingly communicative man who carried on a world-wide correspondence still never wanted to expose in words the core of his existence. It was precisely in the seclusion, the limitation, the silence of Goethe that made the strongest impact on Pieper. Here was modern Germany’s quintessential conversationalist intellectual, but the strength of his words came from the restraint behind them, even to the point of purposeful forgetting:The culmination is when the eighty-year-old sees forgetting not as a convulsive refusal to think of things, but as what could almost be termed a physiological process of simple forgetting as a function of life. He praises as “a great gift of the gods” . . . “the ethereal stream of forgetfulness” which he “was always able to value, to use, and to heighten.” However manifold the forms of this silence and of their unconscious roots and conscious motives may have been, is it not always the possibility of hearing, the possibility of a purer perception of reality that is aimed at? And so, is not Goethe’s type of silence above all the silence of one who listens? . . . This listening silence is much deeper than the mere refraining from words and speech in human intercourse. It means a stillness, which, like a breath, has penetrated into the inmost chamber of one’s own soul. It is meant, in the Goethean “maxim,” to “deny myself as much as possible and to take up the object into myself as purely as it is possible to do.” . . . The meaning of being silent is hearing – a hearing in which the simplicity of the receptive gaze at things is like the naturalness, simplicity, and purity of one receiving a confidence, the reality of which is creatura, God’s creation. And insofar as Goethe’s silence is in this sense a hearing silence, to that extent it has the status of the model and paradigm – however much, in individual instances, reservations and criticism are justified. One could remain circumspectly silent about this exemplariness after the heroic nihilism of our age has proclaimed the attitude of the knower to be by no means that of a silent listener but rather as that of self-affirmation over against being: insight and knowledge are naked defiance, the severest endangering of existence in the midst of the superior strength of concrete being. The resistance of knowledge opposes the oppressive superior power. However, that the knower is not a defiant rebel against concrete being, but above all else a listener who stays silent and, on the basis of his silence, a hearer – it is here that Goethe represents what, since Pythagoras, may be considered the silence tradition of the West.Pieper concludes his remarkable find with this summation:When such talk, which one encounters absolutely everywhere in workshops and in the marketplace – and as a constant temptation – , when such deafening talk, literally out to thwart listening, is linked to hopelessness, we have to ask is there not in silence – listening silence – necessarily a shred of hope? For who could listen in silence to the language of things if he did not expect something to come of such awareness of the truth? And, in a newly founded discipline of silence, is there not a chance not merely to overcome the sterility of everyday talk but also to overcome its brother, hopelessness – possibly if only to the extent that we know the true face of this relationship? I know that here quite different forces come into play which are beyond human control, and perhaps the circulus has to be broken through in a different place. However, one may ask: could not the “quick, strict resolution” to remain silent at the same time serve as a kind of training in hope?

Read more less