Ruskin grew up in suburban London; in later life, he settled in the Lake District . Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle moved in the opposite direction - from rural Scotland to London's Cheyne Walk. This title focuses on writers for whom 'the centre' was a pressing concern.

The three volumes that comprise this set are facsimile reproductions of contemporary biographical material. They include letters, memoirs, poems and articles on three outstanding Victorian literary partnerships. These are the Brownings, Brontes and the Rossettis.

Nude Descending a Staircase is one of the best known works of art in tihs century. It caused a sensation at the historic Armory Show of 1913, being damned by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Yet the criticism in no way perturbed it imperturable creator, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp's "readymades" (the urinal singed by R. Mutt and entitled Fountain, the snow shovel entitled In Advance of the Broken Arm, and other objects bought and exhibits as works of art) are by now familiar objecs of critical derision and delight. And Duchamp's influence has been pervasive throughout modern art, fosterin Neo-Dada, Op Art, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art. Marcel Duchamp's major work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass) was left in a state of "definitive incompletion" in 1923. The notes for this extradordinarywork form the largest part of SALT SELLER. Duchamp collected many of them for his Green Box in 1934, when their publication was immediately hailed by Andre Breton as a major intellectual event. The notes themselves will help the curious but mystified spectator of The Large Glass in no simple or straighforward way. They do, however, demonstrate wht an extraordinarily original process the making of The Bride Stripped Barde by Her Bachelors, Even was. Duchamp's wit is nowhere in greater evidence than in the section "Rrose Selavy & Co." Duchamp was photographed in women's apparel by Man Ray and created a "readymade" female alter-ego Rrose Selavy ("Eros c'est la vie" or "arroser la vie" - drink it up; celebrate life). Rrose printed a calling card and her company advertised - "For practical wear, a Rrose Selavy creation: The oblong cress, designed exclusively for ladies afflicted with hiccups." The company also had a service department which made "...home deliveries: domestic mosquitoes (half stock.)" The surrealists had proclaimed in the twenties that words were no longer playing around but had started making clove. This description seems to fit the sayings of Rrose Selavy who fashioned some of the most joyour and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern literautre.' In the section "Marcel Duchamp, Criticavit", the more serious side of Duchamp is represented by two informative interviews and two important statements on art, "The Creative Act" and "Apropos of Readymades." His more experimental writings are grouped under the title "Texticles." Taken together these varied writings constitute a major document of modern art. Whether the reader sits back and enjoys the charms of Duchamp or studies and attempts to decipher his inner-most secrets, the reader will find SALT SELLAR a compendium of delight.

A compelling portrait of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, by one of the bestselling writers of the twentieth. In this vivid biographical study, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche's habits, passions and obsessions. Concentrating on the man rather than the work, on his tragic isolation and volatile creativity, Zweig draws the reader inexorably into the drama of Nietzsche's life.

One of science fiction's undisputed grandmasters, Frederik Pohl built an astonishing career that spanned more than seven decades. Along the way he won millions of readers and seemingly as many awards while producing novels, short stories, and essays that left a profound mark on the genre. In this first-of-its-kind study, Michael R. Page traces Pohl's journey as an author but also uncovers his role as a transformative figure who shaped the genre as a literary agent, book editor, and in Gardner Dozois' words, "quite probably the best SF magazine editor who ever lived."

This first installment of the new multi-volume Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading recounts Dr. Alan Gribben's fascinating 45-year search for surviving volumes from the large library assembled by Twain and his family. That collection of more than 3,000 titles was dispersed through impromptu donations and abrupt public auctions, but over the years nearly a thousand volumes have been recovered. Gribben's research also encompasses many hundreds of other books, stories, essays, poems, songs, plays, operas, newspapers, and magazines with which Mark Twain was demonstrably familiar. Gribben published the original edition of Mark Twain's Library in 1980. Hailed by the eminent Twain scholar Louis J. Budd as "a superb job that will last for generations," the work nevertheless soon went out of print and for three decades has been a hard-to-find item on the rare book market. Meanwhile, over a distinguished career of writing, teaching, and research on Twain, Gribben continued to annotate, revise, and expand the content such that it has become his life's masterwork. Thoroughly revised, enlarged, and retitled, Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading now reappears, to greatly expand our comprehension of the incomparable author's reading tastes and influences. Volume I traces Twain's extensive use of public libraries. It identifies Twain's favorite works, but also reveals his strong dislikes-Chapter 10 is devoted to his "Library of Literary Hogwash," specimens of atrocious poetry and prose that he delighted in ridiculing. In describing Twain's habit of annotating his library books, Gribben reveals his methods of detecting forged autographs and marginal notes that have fooled booksellers, collectors, and libraries. The volume's 25 chapters trace from various perspectives the patterns of Twain's voracious reading and relate what he read to his own literary outpouring. A "Critical Bibliography" evaluates the numerous scholarly books and articles that have studied Twain's reading, and an index guides readers to the volume's diverse subjects. Twain enjoyed cultivating a public image as a largely unread natural talent; on occasion he even denied being acquainted with titles that he had owned, inscribed, and annotated in his own personal library. He convinced many friends and interviewers that he had no appetite for fiction, poetry, drama, or belles-lettres, yet Gribben reveals volumes of evidence to the contrary. He examines this unlettered pose that Twain affected and speculates about the reasons behind it. In reality, whether Twain was memorizing the classic writings of ancient Rome or the more contemporary works of Milton, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Tennyson-or, for that matter, quoting from the best-selling fiction and poetry of his day-he exhibited a lifelong hunger to overcome the brevity of his formal education. Several of Gribben's chapters explore the connections between Twain's knowledge of authors such as Malory, Shakespeare, Poe, and Browning, and his own literary works, group readings, and family activities. Volumes II and III of Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading will be released in 2019 and will deliver an "Annotated Catalog" arranged from A to Z, documenting in detail the staggering scope of Twain's reading. - book is one-of-a-kind, a monumental project, representing 45 years of research - scholarship of the book is impeccable, by writer internationally known in the Twain community - publisher has a much-publicized association with Alan Gribben; in 2011 we released the highly controversial NewSouth Edition of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, edited by Dr. Gribben - Twain is among our more popular 19th-century American writers, and works about him are often of literary interest

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come' Sunday Times 'Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity ... A moving, fascinating biography' The Times Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain's most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes's lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own.

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine Comedy For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography, which offers a fresh account of the medieval Florentine poet's life and thought before and after his exile in 1302. Beginning with the often violent circumstances of Dante's life, the book examines his successive works as testimony to the course of his passionate humanity: his lyric poetry through to the Vita nova as the great work of his first period; the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia and the poems of his early years in exile; and the Monarchia and the Commedia as the product of his maturity. Describing as it does a journey of the mind, the book confirms the nature of Dante's undertaking as an exploration of what he himself speaks of as "maturity in the flame of love." The result is an original synthesis of Dante's life and work.

Eleanor Cameron (1912-1996) was an innovative and genre-defying author of children's fiction and children's literature criticism. From her beginnings as a librarian, Cameron went on to become a prominent and respected voice in children's literature, writing one of the most beloved children's science fiction novels of all time, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and later winning the National Book Award for her time fantasy The Court of the Stone Children. In addition, Eleanor Cameron played an often vocal role in critical debates about children's literature. She was one of the first authors to take up literary criticism of children's novels and published two influential books of criticism, including The Green and Burning Tree. One of Cameron's most notable acts of criticism came in 1973, when she wrote a scathing critique of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl responded in kind, and the result was a fiery imbroglio within the pages of the Horn Book Magazine. Yet despite her many accomplishments, most of Cameron's books went out of print by the end of her life, and her star faded. This biography aims to reinsert Cameron into the conversation by taking an in-depth look at her tumultuous early life in Ohio and California, her unforgettably forceful personality and criticism, and her graceful, heartfelt novels. The biography includes detailed analysis of the creative process behind each of her published works and how Cameron's feminism, environmentalism, and strong sense of ethics are reflected in and represented by her writings. Drawn from over twenty interviews, thousands of letters, and several unpublished manuscripts in her personal papers, Eleanor Cameron is a tour of the most exciting and creative periods of American children's literature through the experience of one of its valiant purveyors and champions.

WINNER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2021 AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY 'MUST READ' A TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK * * * * * Discover this astonishing work of fiction from award-winning, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Jason Mott. 'Powerful, timely and provocative' ABI DARE, author of GIRL WITH A LOUDING VOICE 'Jason Mott truly has written one hell of a book.' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, author of QUEENIE This is a true story. An author goes on a book tour for his new bestseller which, as people keep telling him, is one hell of a book. This is a coming-of-age story. One morning, he meets The Kid: a young Black boy who looks just like the one he keeps seeing on the news. And The Kid wants him to tell his story. This is a sad story. It's the story of a boy who spent most of his life trying to hide. And it may not be that different from the story of our author. This is a love story. But to find out why, you'll have to read this for yourself.

* TOLKIEN * Now a major motion picture Acclaimed as 'the best book about Tolkien', this award-winning biography explores J.R.R. Tolkien's wartime experiences and their impact on his life and his writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. "To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 ... by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead." So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life. It shows how, after two of these brilliant young men were killed, Tolkien pursued the dream they had all shared by launching his epic of good and evil. John Garth argues that the foundation of tragic experience in the First World War is the key to Middle-earth's enduring power. Tolkien used his mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day. This is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, meticulously researched and distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources.

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career-from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank's unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times. The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.

In The Torch in My Ear Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner, towering intellectual figure and polymath, gives us his second volume of autobiography. Using as a framework his admiration for his first great mentor, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus, and his passion for his first wife, Veza, Canetti seamlessly incorporates a profoundly perceptive portrait of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. Here are the voices of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. This is autobiography redefining itself.

Bringing together insights from masculinity studies and age studies, this open access book focuses on the gendered and relational perspectives in cultural representations of Alzheimer's disease. Combining a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the authors analyse the interrelations between masculinities and representations of dementia from a wide range of cultural contexts to explore it as an intensely gendered and cultural disease. They examine memoir, film, poetry and prose fiction, and look at work from a wide range of authors, including Anne Carson, Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, to provide new insights into established narratives of dementia and explore the complex ways that the disease resists representation and narration and questions traditional views of selfhood and human development. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the ERA Gender-Net+ Project MASCAGE, the University of Graz (Center for Inter-American Studies) and the Government of Styria, Austria.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft had a short life, and he died of cancer in 1936 at the age of 46. But in that relatively short time he had a significant, varied and outstanding output, and although he was not a well-known writer during the time he lived, he has since been hailed as one of the great supernatural fiction writers. Although a huge influence on many writers since his death, and now someone with significant book sales every year, Lovecraft never managed to make a living from writing during his lifetime. Lovecraft spent much time battling various physical and mental issues, but he was able to form bonds and relationships with key people in his life, some of which influenced his thinking and his work. These included his mother, grandfather, aunt, wife and famous figures from the time including Harry Houdini and Robert E Howard; comments from many are included. Lovecraft's sensitivity comes through in his writing, and this book also contains numerous quotes from his famous fictional works. Samples from his poems, letters and other writings serve to paint a full portrait of this master of his chosen genre, horror, but who also contributed significantly to science fiction and fantasy; he truly possessed outstanding talent, as celebrated inside. SAMPLE QUOTE: 'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.' - Francis Wayland Thurston sets the scene for indescribable horror in The Call of Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft, 1926. SAMPLE FACT: HP Lovecraft's work was the inspiration behind Arkham Asylum (Batman), Black Sabbath's album Behind the Wall of Sleep and The Book of the Dead from the Evil Dead movies.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence, which collates all Waugh's letters, diaries, and other personal writings in chronological order. Volume one of the series covers the years 1903-1921, ending with Waugh's departure from Lancing College, aged 18, with a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford. For many years at Lancing Waugh kept a daily account of his life, and every diary entry is reprinted here along with the lively pen-and ink drawings that accompanied them and the letters he sent to his parents and friends. No other book presents such a rich anthology of writing by a school-boy, let alone one who would later turn into a major literary figure and novelist of genius.

This book, the first of two volumes anticipating the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray in 1811, details not only the author's life, but also the cosmopolitan and literary worlds inhabited by his two daughters, Minny and Annie. When Thackeray died in 1863, the two sisters were forced to find their own way forward. Minny would marry Leslie Stephen, later father of Virginia Woolf, and die at only thirty-five; Annie, encouraged in early years by her father, would herself emerge as a successful novelist, though one always living, albeit willingly, within her father's shadow. Drawing continuously on the letters, diaries, journals and notebooks of the Thackerays and their circle, Aplin sheds light on this remarkable man's family, and the effect that his life, death and legacy had on those closest to him. The book will appeal not just to those interested in Thackeray and the Victorians, but also to readers of biography, womenis studies and memoirs, and to followers of Viriginia Woolf and Bloomsbury.

Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.

This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces, and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of his ascetic lifestyle and environment - frequently constituted as a nature sanctuary - interrogating its relation to his other jurisdictions.

Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting). Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo . 'One of the most illuminating and insufficiently praised books of the last 60 years.' Observer 'Never bettered.' Guardian 'Brilliant.' Julian Barnes 'Wholly original.' Craig Brown 'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes 'Extraordinary.' Penelope Lively June 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining. With the ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiance, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams Hampstead Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles host parties for a visiting German novelist and suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, they find their entwined lives spiralling around the tragedy . . . One of the first-ever group biographies, Alethea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month is a lively mosaic of archival riches inspired by the collages of the Pop Artists. A groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965, her portrait of Victorian London's literati is just as vivid, witty and enticing today. 'Elegant Hayter more or less invented the biographical form which is a close study of a brief period in the life of an individual or a group . . . A rigorous scholar [with] an artist's eye.' A. S. Byatt 'Hayter's clever, innovative book turned a searchlight on a time, a place, a circle of people; it has surely inspired the subsequent fashion for group biographies.' Penelope Lively 'Nothing I've ever read has flung me so immediately into those streets, that weather, that period. Hayter never forgets that people want stories, that lives are stories.' Margaret Forster 'Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence.' Richard Holmes 'A pioneer . . . Beautifully written vignettes . . . Immaculate scholarship and intense readability.' Jonathan Bate 'Outstanding . . . A small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess 'A brilliant recreation of London literary life in 1846, which is highly original in its form and narrative cross-cutting.' Julian Barnes

'The book amounts to a comprehensive literary history of the time.' David Sexton, Evening Standard Volume 5 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot finds the poet, between the ages of forty-two and forty-four, reckoning with the strict implications of his Christian faith for his life, his work, and his poetry. The letters between Eliot and his associates, family and friends - his correspondents range from the Archbishop of York and the American philosopher Paul Elmer More to the writers Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read and Ralph Hodgson - serve to illuminate the ways in which his Anglo-Catholic convictions could, at times, prove a self-chastising and even alienating force. 'Anyone who has been moving among intellectual circles and comes to the Church, may experience an odd and rather exhilarating feeling of isolation,' he remarks. Notwithstanding, he becomes fully involved in doctrinal controversy: he espouses the Church as an arena of discipline and order. Eliot's relationship with his wife, Vivien, continues to be turbulent, and at times desperate, as her mental health deteriorates and the communication between husband and wife threatens, at the coming end of the year, to break down completely. At the close of this volume Eliot will accept a visiting professorship at Harvard University, which will take him away from England and Vivien for the academic year 1932-33.

Hunter S. Thompson is best remembered today as a caricature: drug-addled, sharp-witted, and passionate; played with bowlegged aplomb by Johnny Depp; memorialized as a Doonesbury character. In all this entertainment, the true figure of Thompson has unfortunately been forgotten. In this perceptive, dramatic book, Tim Denevi recounts the moment when Thompson found his calling. As the Kennedy assassination and the turmoil of the 60s paved the way for Richard Nixon, Thompson greeted him with two very powerful emotions: fear and loathing. In his fevered effort to take down what he saw as a rising dictator, Thompson made a kind of Faustian bargain, taking the drugs he needed to meet newspaper deadlines and pushing himself beyond his natural limits. For ten years, he cast aside his old ambitions, troubled his family, and likely hastened his own decline, along the way producing some of the best political writing in our history. This remarkable biography reclaims Hunter Thompson for the enigmatic true believer he was: not a punchline or a cartoon character, but a fierce, colorful opponent of fascism in a country that suddenly seemed all too willing to accept it.

'A marvel of clarity, fluency, and (Morris's favourite word in her final days) kindness.' The Sunday Times 'A measured and elegant biography that Morris aficionados will find fascinating.' The Times The first full account of a truly remarkable life. When Jan Morris passed away in 2020, she was considered one of Britain's best-loved writers. The author of Venice, Pax Britannica, Conundrum, and more than fifty other books, her work was known for its observational genius, lyricism, and humour, and had earned her a passionate readership around the world. Morris's life was no less fascinating than her oeuvre. Born in 1926, she spent her childhood amidst Oxford's Gothic beauty and later participated in military service in Italy and the Middle East, before embarking on a career as an internationally feted foreign correspondent. From being the only journalist to join the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 to covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Morris's reportage spanned many of the twentieth century's defining moments. However, public success masked a private dilemma that was only resolved when she transitioned genders in the late sixties, becoming renowned as a transgender pioneer. She went on to live happily with her wife Elizabeth in Wales for another five decades, and never stopped writing and publishing. Here, for the first time, the many strands of Morris's rich and at times paradoxical life are brought together. Based on a wealth of interviews, archival material, and hitherto unpublished documents, Jan Morris: life from both sides portrays a person of extraordinary talent, curiosity, and joie de vivre.