The complex and fascinating life of Mark Twain, as told by a Pulitzer prizewinning biographer

Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influen­tial, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Mark Twain went west and accepted a job at the local newspaper, writing dis­patches that attracted attention for their brashness and humour. It wasn’t long until the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance.

In this rich and nuanced portrait of Twain, Ron Chernow brings his powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a jour­nalist, satirist, and performer, and a family man, Twain went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the epicentre of American culture, emerging as the nation’s most notable political pundit and the only white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him and led him and his family to nine years of exile between London, France, Germany and Italy. During this time, he lost his wife and two daughters – the last stage of his life marked by heartache, politi­cal crusades, and eccentric behaviour that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.

Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, includ­ing thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow here captures the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in literary history, reminding us why Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated and quoted over a hundred years after his passing..

'I am sure the more fully she - Charlotte Brontë - the friend, the daughter, the sister, the wife, is known - the more highly she will be appreciated.' Mrs Gaskell was quite clear about her priorities when she began to set down the facts of a 'wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it'. The result was one of the greatest of all English biographies. The book itself was not to be without its stormy passage: Mrs Gaskell, as well she knew, ran up against Victorian shibboleths of propriety and sexual prudery. However, not even the amendments and cuts she was obliged to make in the second and third editions could destroy its overall unity or her psychologically convincing vision of the suffering, emotionally starved and tortured Charlotte Brontë whose life and pitiful death still grips and appalls us. The present text follows the controversial first edition throughout, while all the variations which appeared in the third edition have been recorded in notes and appendices.

As the year 1386 began, Geoffrey Chaucer was a middle-aged bureaucrat and sometime poet, living in London and enjoying the perks that came with his close connections to its booming wool trade. When it ended, he was jobless, homeless, out of favour with his friends and living in exile. Such a reversal might have spelled the end of his career; but instead, at the loneliest time of his life, Chaucer made the revolutionary decision to 'maken vertu of necessitee' and keep writing. The result - The Canterbury Tales - was a radically new form of poetry that would make his reputation, bring him to a national audience, and preserve his work for posterity. In The Poet's Tale, Paul Strohm brings Chaucer's world to vivid life, from the streets and taverns of crowded medieval London to rural seclusion in Kent, and reveals this crucial year as a turning point in the fortunes of England's most important poet.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 'This magnificent, highly readable double biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' The Financial Times 'A gripping saga of a double-biography' Daily Mail 'A masterful portrait' The Times 'Vastly enjoyable' Literary Review 'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.

Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2017 'Against anything I had ever been told was possible, I was turning white. On the surface of my skin, a miracle was quietly brewing . . .' Suburban Australia. Sweltering heat. Three bedroom blonde-brick. Family of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke's life is just like all the other Aussie kids on her street. Except for this one, glaring, inescapably obvious thing. From one of Australia's most exciting writers, and the author of the multi-award-winning FOREIGN SOIL, comes THE HATE RACE: a powerful, funny, and at times devastating memoir about growing up black in white middle-class Australia.

When Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, acclaimed critic Lesley Chamberlain uses this charge as the starting point from which to explore the expansiveness of the inner world Rilke created in his poetry. Weaving together searching insights on Rilke's life, work and reception, Chamberlain casts Rilke's inwardness as a profound response to a world that seemed ever more lacking in spirituality. In works of dazzling imagination and rich imagery, Rilke sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty.

Frederick forsyth has seen it all. And lived to tell the tale…

At eighteen, Forsyth was the youngest pilot to qualify with the RAF. At twenty-five, he was stationed in East Berlin as a journalist during the Cold War. Before he turned thirty, he was in Africa controversially covering the bloodiest civil war in living memory. Three years later, broke and out of work, he wrote his game-changing first novel, The Day of the Jackal. He never looked back.

Forsyth has seen some of the most exhilarating moments of the last century from the inside, travelling the world, once or twice on her majesty’s secret service. He’s been shot at, he’s been arrested, he’s even been seduced by an undercover agent.

But all the while he felt he was an outsider. This is his story.

One of the most celebrated and prolific authors of the Victorian era, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) requested that his autobiography be published posthumously. The two-volume work, first published in 1883 and reissued here in the second edition of that year, recounts his childhood, successful career at the Post Office, and multiple achievements as a writer. Well received by the critics of the time, the work reveals the incredible discipline that enabled Trollope to write forty-seven novels in the course of his career. Of particular interest to literary scholars, the reflections on his early life show how his unhappy childhood and his father's financial problems influenced his fiction. Volume 1 covers Trollope's education and early Post Office career, before discussing his first authorial efforts. Two of Trollope's non-fiction works, North America (1862) and Australia and New Zealand (1873), have also been reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.

One of the most celebrated and prolific authors of the Victorian era, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) requested that his autobiography be published posthumously. The two-volume work, first published in 1883 and reissued here in the second edition of that year, recounts his childhood, successful career at the Post Office, and multiple achievements as a writer. Well received by the critics of the time, the work reveals the incredible discipline that enabled Trollope to write forty-seven novels in the course of his career. Of particular interest to literary scholars, the reflections on his early life show how his unhappy childhood and his father's financial problems influenced his fiction. Volume 2 goes into greater detail on Trollope's writing technique, and includes his thoughts on fellow writers and literary criticism. Two of Trollope's non-fiction works, North America (1862) and Australia and New Zealand (1873), have also been reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.

Soon after its publication on 30 September 1868, Little Women became an enormous international bestseller. When Anne Boyd Rioux read it in her twenties, it had a powerful effect on her and through teaching it, she has seen its effect on many others. In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, she recounts Louisa May Alcott's inspiration for the book and examines why this tale set in the American Civil War has resonated through time. Alcott's novel has moved generations of women, amongst them writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, J.K. Rowling, Cynthia Ozick and Ursula K. Le Guin. Rioux sees the novel's beating heart in its portrayal of family resilience and its look at the struggles of girls growing into women. In gauging its current status, she shows why it remains a book with such power that people carry its characters and spirit throughout their lives.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary novel by Wolfgang von Johann Goethe, originally published in 1774. In a series of letters to a friend, Werther recounts his time in the simple village of Walheim and the peasants he befriends there. He falls in love with Charlotte, but is tortured by his emotions as she is soon to be married and cannot return his love. The novel is celebrated as an early example of Romantic literature and its influence on later writings sustains its continued importance.

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of the influential magazine Commentary. As both an editor and a writer, he spearheaded the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and - after he 'broke ranks' - the neoconservative response. For years he defined what was at stake in the struggle against communism; recently he has nerved America for a new struggle against jihadist Islam; always he has given substance to debates over the function of religion, ethics, and the arts in our society. The turning point of his life occurred, at the age of forty near a farmhouse in upstate New York, in a mystic clarification. It compelled him to 'unlearn' much that he had earlier been taught to value, and it also made him enemies. Revealing the private as well as the public man, Thomas L. Jeffers chronicles a heroically coherent life.

In the autumn of 1915, in a "slightly heroic mood", E.M. Forster arrived in Alexandria, full of lofty ideals as a volunteer for the Red Cross. Yet most of his time was spent exploring "the magic, antiquity and complexity" of the place in order to cope with living in what he saw as a "funk-hole". With a novelist's pen, he brings to life the fabled, romantic city of Alexander the Great, capital of Graeco-Roman Egypt, beacon of light and culture symbolised by the Pharos, where the doomed love affair of Antony and Cleopatra was played out and the greatest library the world has ever known was built. Threading 3,000 years of history with vibrant strands of literature and punctuating the narrative with his own experiences, Forster immortalised Alexandria, painting an incomparable portrait of the great city and, inadvertently, himself.

This study explores the poetics and politics of self in J. M. Coetzee's "autre"-biographical works "Scenes from Provincial Life". The author provides a detailed analysis of Coetzee's conception of self in his fictionalized memoirs, as well as of philosophical, aesthetic and political implications of "autre"-biography. She reads these works as literary figurations of an estranged self, maintaining that they engage with deeply historical but also universal questions of the relation between self and power. Coetzee's fictionalized memoirs, she argues, are thus not merely dramatizations of the inherent elusiveness of the self but a critique of systems and discourses of normativization and oppression.

Gregory Sumner guides readers through a biography of 15 of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works, giving them a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American dream - grandiose ambition, unbridled material success and individualism.

Originally published in 1952, this biography collects both the published and unpublished correspondence of Hannah More, as well as the plethora of references made to her in contemporary letters and memoirs, in order to create a portrait of a deeply religious and philanthropic playwright and educator who challenged the mores of her society. Jones charts the continuity and change of More's interests through her life, and in doing so reveals a cross-section of English religious and social life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the role and place of women in this period of great cultural development and change.

Authoritative biography of cult writer William Burroughs (1914-1997). It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media - Burroughs has written novels, memoirs, technical manuals and poetry, he has painted, made collages, taken thousands of photographs, made visual scrapbooks, produced hundreds of hours of experimental tapes, acted in movies and recorded more CDs than most rock groups. Made a cult figure by the publication of NAKED LUNCH, Burroughs was a mentor to the 1960s youth culture. Underground papers referred to him as 'Uncle Bill' and he ranked alongside Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Buckminster Fuller and R.D. Laing as one of the 'gurus' of the youth movement who might just have the secret of the universe. Based upon extensive research, this biography paints a new portrait of Burroughs, making him real to the reader and showing how he was perceived by his contemporaries in all his guises - from icily distant to voluble drunk. It shows how his writing was very much influenced by his life situation and by the people he met on his travels around America and Europe. He was, beneath it all, a man torn by emotions: his guilt at not visiting his doting mother; his despair at not responding to reconciliation attempts from his father; his distance from his brother; the huge void that separated him from his son; and above all his killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer.

In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. Lewis maps the medieval mind, accepts Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into a breath-taking story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting ground-breaking Old English scholarship and elucidating the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. This extraordinary group biography also focuses on Charles Williams, strange acolyte of Romantic love, and Owen Barfield, an esoteric philosopher who became, for a time, Saul Bellow's guru. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized sanity, Christians with cosmic reach, the inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years and did so.

'Every deep feeling a human is capable of will be shaken loose by this short, but profound book' David Sedaris 'I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.' Ariel Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she lived believing that conventional rules no longer applied - that marriage doesn't have to mean monogamy, that aging doesn't have to mean infertility, that she could be 'the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses'. But all of her assumptions about what she can control are undone after a string of overwhelming losses. 'I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.' Levy's own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed - and what never can.

An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, "A Writer's Diary" was drawn by her husband from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries that refer to her own writing and those that are clearly writing exercises, accounts of people and scenes relevant to the raw material of her work, and finally, comments on books she was reading. The first entry is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world - the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision - of one of the great writers of our century.