In June 1942, Anne Frank received a red-and-white-checked diary for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in an Amsterdam attic to escape the Nazis. For two years, with ever-increasing maturity, Anne crafted a memoir that has become one of the most compelling documents of modern history. But Anne Frank's diary, argues Francine Prose, is as much a work of art as it is a historical record. Through close reading, she marvels at the teenage Frank's skillfully natural narrative voice, at her finely tuned dialogue and ability to turn living people into characters.

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world. Along the way, Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was not an accidental author or a casual teenage chronicler but a writer of prodigious talent and ambition.

John Cleland is among the most scandalous figures in British literary history, both celebrated and attacked as a pioneer of pornographic writing in English. His first novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, " or "Fanny Hill," is one of the enduring literary creations of the eighteenth century, despite over two hundred years of legal prohibition. Yet the full range of his work is still too little known.

In this study, Hal Gladfelder combines groundbreaking archival research into Cleland's tumultuous life with incisive readings of his sometimes extravagant, sometimes perverse body of work, positioning him as a central figure in the development of the novel and in the construction of modern notions of authorial and sexual identity in eighteenth-century England.

Rather than a traditional biography, "Fanny Hill in Bombay" presents a case history of a renegade authorial persona, based on published works, letters, private notes, and newly discovered legal testimony. It retraces Cleland's career from his years as a young colonial striver with the East India Company in Bombay through periods of imprisonment for debt and of estrangement from collaborators and family, shedding light on his paradoxical status as literary insider and social outcast.

As novelist, critic, journalist, and translator, Cleland engaged with the most challenging intellectual currents of his era yet at the same time was vilified as a pornographer, atheist, and sodomite. Reconnecting Cleland's writing to its literary and social milieu, this study offers new insights into the history of authorship and the literary marketplace and contributes to contemporary debates on pornography, censorship, the history of sexuality, and the contested role of literature in eighteenth-century culture.

This is an essential early Johnson biography, recovered from obscurity and reissued in celebration of the tercentenary of Johnson's birth. This is the first and only scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins' Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., a work that has not been widely available in complete form for more than two hundred years. Published in 1787, some four years before James Boswell's biography of Johnson, ""Hawkins' Life"" complements, clarifies, and often corrects numerous aspects of Boswell's Life. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is the most significant English writer of the second half of the eighteenth century; indeed, this period is widely known as the Age of Johnson. Hawkins was Johnson's friend and legal adviser and the chief executor of his will. He knew Johnson longer and in many respects better than other biographers, including Boswell, who made unacknowledged use of Hawkins' Life and helped orchestrate the critical attacks that consigned the book to obscurity. Sir John Hawkins had special insight into Johnson's mental states at various points in his life, his early days in London, his association with the ""Gentleman's Magazine"", and his political views and writings. Hawkins' use of historical and cultural details, an uncommon literary device at the time, produced one of the earliest 'life and times' biographies in our language. O M Brack, Jr.'s introduction covers the history of the composition, publication, and reception of the Life and provides a context in which it should be read. Annotations address historical, literary, and linguistic uncertainties, and a full textual apparatus documents how Brack arrived at this definitive text of Hawkins' Life.

Few people are aware that the true identity of William Shakespeare represents Western Civilization's greatest mystery. Even fewer realize that the commonly accepted authorship by William Shaksper of Stratford-on-Avon, who was illiterate, is a complete hoax manufactured by England's leading politicians, William Cecil and his son, Robert, for personal reasons of greed and power.

The hoax survived largely unscathed until 1920 when J. Thomas Looney's brilliant book, "Shakespeare Identified," plucked Edward de Vere's buried name out of historical obscurity and introduced him to the world as the real Shakespeare. Fighting the astonishing power of conventional wisdom, believers in the de Vere theory have steadily built their case through now hard-to-find scholarly research for the past ninety years.

This anthology series, "Building the Case for Edward de Vere as Shakespeare," salvages fascinating, neglected authorship material which repeatedly and convincingly shows that Edward de Vere was the uniquely creative genius who wrote under the coerced pen name of William Shakespeare.

A single-minded adventurer and an eternal child who gave us the iconic Willy Wonka and Matilda Wormwood, Roald Dahl lived a life filled with incident, drama and adventure: from his harrowing experiences as an RAF fighter pilot and his work in British intelligence, to his many romances and turbulent marriage to the actress Patricia Neal, to the mental anguish caused by the death of his young daughter Olivia. In "Storyteller, "the first authorized biography of Dahl, Donald Sturrock--granted unprecedented access to the Dahl estate's archives--draws on personal correspondence, journals and interviews with family members and famous friends to deliver a masterful, witty and incisive look at one of the greatest authors and eccentric characters of the modern age, whose work still delights millions around the world today.

The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure, then finally on something very different--if death came to seem inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one could truly say one lived?
Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine, for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. These letters show the clarity of mind and will that led to that decision, the courage and distress in making it, and the gaiety even once it was made. She went against what her education, her husband, and most of her friends would regard as reasonable, as she opted to spend her last months with Russian emigres and a strange assortment of Gurdjieff disciples (which she was not). But Fontainebleau give her the space and the incentive to shake free from the intellectualism that she thought the malaise of her time, as she worked at kitchen chores, took in the details of farm life, tried to learn Russian, and attempted to reach total honesty with herself. "If I were allowed one simple cry to God," she wrote in one of her last letters, "that cry would be I want to be REAL."

David Foster is the most original, challenging, contradictory, risk-taking and infuriating Australian novelist of his generation. To date he has published twelve novels, three collections of novellas and short stories, two books of poetry, and a collection of essays, with several produced radio plays. Foster writes in an Australian tradition of idiosyncratic satire and comedy that may be traced through the work of Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Xavier Herbert and David Ireland. His novels are the most wide-ranging and fearless of the Australian novels that have contributed to the late twentieth-century re-examination of Western ideologies and the literary forms in which they are expressed. In this first critical study of David Foster's works, Professor Susan Lever steers us into penetrating the mysteries of Foster's fiction, and provides guidance to readers willing to approach them. The book examines the contradictory nature of his commitments and interests as expressed mainly in his novels. Each of his works of fiction and poetry in the order of publication (except for The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover which are discussed with similar novels) are discussed. The development of Foster's philosophical ideas and technique as a novelist over the 35 years of his writing life to date is followed. The book also examines Foster's letters to Geoffrey Dutton early in his career; his interviews and essays provide some of the background to these novels. The book also furnishes a sense of the Australian context for his work. A brief biography of Foster's early life and a discussion of his approach to satire is also included.

Walden is one of the best-known non-fiction books ever written by an American. It details Thoreau's sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Walden was written with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau hoped to isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simplicity and self-reliance were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by Transcendentalist philosophy. This book is full of fascinating musings and reflections. As pertinent and relevant today as it was when it was first written.

The Life of William Shakespeare is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of Shakespeare's life and works focusing on oftern neglected literary and historical contexts: what Shakespeare read, who he worked with as an author and an actor, and how these various collaborations may have affected his writing. * Written by an eminent Shakespearean scholar and experienced theatre reviewer * Pays particular attention to Shakespeare's theatrical contemporaries and the ways in which they influenced his writing * Offers an intriguing account of the life and work of the great poet-dramatist structured around the idea of memory * Explores often neglected literary and historical contexts that illuminate Shakespeare's life and works

The first comprehensive biography of this iconic artist to appear in English. Richly illustrated with 160 photographs. Since her dramatic death at the age of 31 the name Ingrid Jonker has been linked to that of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath - legends who died young. In her first biography to appear in English, the frail figure of Jonker as a child, a young poet, daughter of a prominent politician, wife, mother, mistress of a famous author, lover and rebel is portrayed against the backdrop of revolt against South Africa's policies of censorship and apartheid.

I have been a fan of the Sherlock Holmes tales since I was given The Long Stories and The Short Stories in 1961. So when I retired twelve years ago I decided that I would compile a book on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The majority of the content is taken from newspaper and magazine articles from 1998-2011 and some book forewords, the greater part containing information which I had never seen or read before.

Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright. Ever since he took the theatre of Elizabethan London by storm over 400 years ago, Shakespeare has remained centre stage. His fame stems not only from his plays - performed everywhere from school halls to the world's most illustrious theatres - but also from his enigmatic persona. His face is familiar to all, yet in reality very little is known about the man behind the masterpieces. Shakespeare's life, despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, is still a thicket of myths and traditions, some preposterous, some conflicting, arranged around the few scant facts known about the Bard - from his birth in Stratford to the bequest of his second best bed to his wife when he died. Taking us on a journey through the streets of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Bryson examines centuries of stories, half-truths and downright lies surrounding our greatest dramatist. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, he introduces a host of engaging characters, as he celebrates the magic of Shakespeare's language and delights in details of the bard's life, folios, poetry and plays.

Robert Baldick's Life of J.-K. Huysmans has become not just a standard reference work, to be consulted as regularly as the writing of the author whose life it chronicles, but a work of literature in its own right. First published fifty years ago, Baldick's classic biography presents a compelling narrative of Huysmans' life and work in all its various phases - from the Naturalism of the 1870s to the Decadence of the 1880s, and from the occult vogue of the 1890s to the Catholic Revival of the turn of the century - and it is written with such impeccable scholarship that it is still relied on today as regards matters of fact and detail. For this new edition - the first time the biography has been reprinted in English -Baldick's notes have been extensively revised and updated by Brendan King to take account of new developments and publications in the field of Huysmansian studies.

Edmund Curll was a notorious figure among the publishers of the early eighteenth century: for his boldness, his lack of scruple, his publication of work without author's consent, and his taste for erotic and scandalous publications. He was in legal trouble on several occasions for piracy and copyright infringement, unauthorized publication of the works of peers, and for seditious, blasphemous, and obscene publications. He stood in the pillory in 1728 for seditious libel. Above all, he was the constant target of the greatest poet and satirist of his age, Alexander Pope, whose work he pirated whenever he could and who responded with direct physical revenge (an emetic slipped into a drink) and persistent malign caricature. The war between Pope and Curll typifies some of the main cultural battles being waged between creativity and business. The story has normally been told from the poet's point of view, though more recently Curll has been celebrated as a kind of literary freedom-fighter; this book, the first full biography of Curll since Ralph Straus's The Unspeakable Curll (1927), seeks to give a balanced and thoroughly-researched account of Curll's career in publishing between 1706 and 1747, untangling the mistakes and misrepresentations that have accrued over the years and restoring a clear sense of perspective to Curll's dealings in the literary marketplace. It examines the full range of Curll's output, including his notable antiquarian series, and uses extensive archive material to detail Curll's legal and other troubles. For the first time, what is known about this strange, interesting, and awkward figure is authoritatively told.

Drawing on private and published sources, Roger Fagge takes an in-depth look at J.B. Priestley's work, seeking to reclaim him as an important English thinker. Priestley grew up in Bradford, and served on the front line in the First World War, before attending Cambridge and embarking on a career as a writer. A committed radical, he wrote widely for the press, as well as producing autobiographies, social criticism and plays. This work revealed a growing interest in the meaning of Englishness and the start of a long-running relationship with America. Priestley achieved even greater influence during the early years of World War II via his popular BBC radio 'postscripts'. His later career, however, saw his faith in the people give way to a disillusionment with the spread of the Americanised mass society, although his critical response to the latter maintained a perceptive engagement with world. The Vision of J.B. Priestley charts the continuities, strengths and weaknesses in the author's long career, and his vision of an outward looking radical Englishness.

Concerning itself with biography and bio-fiction written in English and in French and also taking in American and Australian subjects, Outsider Biographies focuses on writers who have a criminal record and on notorious criminals who authors of bio-fiction consider as writers. It pursues an understanding of the formal effects of life-writers' struggles between championing their subjects and a deep ambivalence towards their subjects' crimes. The book analyses the challenge that these literary outsiders present to the mainstream French- and English-language traditions where many biographers assign merit to productive lives well lived. The book's approach illuminates both differences in those traditions from the mid-eighteenth, to the twenty-first century and a convergence between them, evident in the experimental-cum-fictional devices in recent English-language biography. Outsider Biographies advances wide-ranging new interpretations of the biographical writing on each of its seven subjects, but does so in a way that invites the reader picking up the book out of a passion for just one of those subjects, to follow the thread onto another and yet another.