As a single mother of two young children, Charlotte set out to build a new life. She leaves her entire family behind in Virginia for the opportunities Ohio offered to her and her family. With just a high school education, no money, and completely alone, she redefined herself into a woman destine for success. building new friendships, and raising two children, Charlotte blended herself into small town life amongst the corn and soy fields of Centerburg, Ohio. Her two sons, Trent and David, were given a life better than the one she had as a child. She had done what every mother dreamed of doing for her two boys. tragedy entered her home. Cancer took from her what had taken years to build. Not only did the disease destroy her, it destroyed the lives of her two teenage sons. They would be the ones who would feel the full hurt of a broken home. of those left behind to put the pieces back together. Death was just the beginning of many pains Charlotte's sons would endure before rebuilding their own lives.

Virginia Woolf has been among the most scrutinised figures of the past century. Her unique literary genius, her pioneering work for women's rights, her position at the nucleus of the Bloomsbury group, her high-profile family and marriage, her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, and her suicide have all been dissected. Life and art were, for Woolf, inextricably entangled, and the autobiographical elements of many of her works, including the masterpieces To The Lighthouse and The Waves, have heightened interest in this most fascinating of figures. Elizabeth Wright here takes a fresh look at the life and legacy of one of the greatest figures of English literature. Perfect for Woolf enthusiasts and newcomers alike, Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf offers a concise, authoritative account of the author's life, and presents an engaging overview of her afterlife in literary history.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn't like the way they were depicted.

The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American icon. Her essays, particularly those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have resonated in American culture to a degree unmatched over the past half century. Two generations of writers have taken her as the measure of what it means to write personal essays. No one writes about California, the sixties, media narratives, cultural mythology, or migraines without taking Didion into account. She has also written five novels; several screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and three late-in-life memoirs, including The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, which have brought her a new wave of renown. Conversations with Joan Didion features seventeen interviews with the author spanning decades, continents, and genres. Didion reflects on her childhood in Sacramento; her time at Berkeley (both as a student and later as a visiting professor), New York, and Hollywood; her marriage to Dunne; and of course her writing. Didion describes her methods of writing, the ways in which the various genres she has worked in inform one another, and the concerns that have motivated her to write.

Letters written 1979-1986. Biographical information and stories. Henry Miller wrote to Mrabet: "The fact that you can not read has perhaps made you a better writer than most who do read." Paul Bowles said: "I've been corresponding with Irving Stettner for several years. Everyone tells me he is a delightful man. Mrabet does write him letters. I don't "ghostwrite" them; I merely translate them as he dictates." Irving Stettner, prose writer, poet and watercolorist; friend of Henry Miller; published Stroker magazine for 30 years.

"His Story: Mustafa Kemal and Turkish Revolution" gives specific information on the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of Republic of Turkey and vertiginous aspects of Turkish Revolution.

Passages from Mustafa Kemal's life, the basic characteristics of the democratic-national leadership which was commanding the Freedom War can also be found within the pages. Freedom War, forming of a new Republic which has become a model for the III. World and İslamic countries are also being discussed.

Founding a republic also means founding a nation in westerner words. What were the principles of the new republic, the aims of the revolutions, resistance of the opponents and the results... The meaning and aspects of 6 Arrows which represent the heart of Kemalism... "His Story" will not just give you information about Turkish Modernization practice, it will also change your opinions on the dilemma called West versus East forever.

The first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years, and the most complete telling of his life and times to date. NOMINATED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2019 'The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade' TLS 'Simply the best modern biography of Wilde... A terrific achievement' Evening Standard 'Page-turning... Vivid and desperately moving. However much you think you know Wilde, this book will absorb and entertain you' The Sunday TimesBooks of the Year Oscar Wilde's life - like his wit - was alive with paradox. He was both an early exponent and a victim of 'celebrity culture': famous for being famous, he was lauded and ridiculed in equal measure. His achievements were frequently downplayed, his successes resented. He had a genius for comedy but strove to write tragedies. He was an unabashed snob who nevertheless delighted in exposing the faults of society. He affected a dandified disdain but was prone to great acts of kindness. Although happily married, he became a passionate lover of men and - at the very peak of his success - brought disaster upon himself. He disparaged authority, yet went to the law to defend his love for Lord Alfred Douglas. Having delighted in fashionable throngs, Wilde died almost alone. Above all, his flamboyant refusal to conform to the social and sexual orthodoxies of his day make him a hero and an inspiration to all who seek to challenge convention. Matthew Sturgis draws on a wealth of new material and fresh research, bringing alive the distinctive mood and characters of the fin de siecle in the richest and most compelling portrait of Wilde to date.

H.G. Wells was one of the most prolific writers in the English language. He published over one hundred books, yet he is recognized by only two or three of his popular novels including "The Time Machine" and "War of the Worlds." Why has such a well known and widely read author from the nineteenth century almost disappeared from the bookshelves of the twenty-first century? "H.G. Wells at the End of His Tether" attempts to answer this question and others by examining his work from a nineteenth century perspective. Wells was a controversial figure. He was an avid socialist and a self-proclaimed prophet. He hated the Church and the Monarchy and spent much of his life promoting utopian ideals, world government and other radical concepts that are politically incorrect today. As he watched the First World War tear Europe asunder he wrote "The War to End War" and created a new label for that infamous conflict. He was a highly vocal anti-war journalist and often frustrated by how little impact he was making on the world. When the Second World War descended on Europe he became despondent as he approached the end of his political and literary tether.

Samuel Pepys began his celebrated diary in 1660, at the age of 26, as a young and ambitious secretary. Due to his support of the king's restoration, he soon found himself in an influential position in the Royal Navy's administration. He was to keep the diary for nearly ten years, until his eye sight failed, and in it he would record many of the great events of the age, such as the outbreak of plague and the Great Fire of London, as well as many smaller, domestic and personal happenings. Although written in shorthand and principally for his own personal remembrance and pleasure, it is clear at times that Pepys had one eye on posterity. It is a large work, conveniently divided into one volume per year; here is the first, based on the first complete edition, that of Henry B. Wheatley, originally published in 1893.

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) is one of the great undiscovered geniuses of Victorian literature. His poetry expresses the religious doubt of the age as well as exposing its sexual hypocrisy. His life is packed full of relationships and encounters with some of the great names of the 19th century; Florence Nightingale, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal Newman, Tennyson, the Arnolds and so on. Clough's early death at the age of 42, worn down, it is said, by working as a factotum for Nightingale, was widely seen as a personal tragedy of unfulfilled promise. Now Kenny, the distinguished philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, proposes to write three first major biography of Clough in thirty years. It is a task that has attracted others- Claire Tomalin for example- but Kenny is supremely qualified to do so. Not only is he already the editor of Clough's diaries, he has unrivalled insights into the world that contributed to Clough's tortured existence and has a lifelong knowledge of Clough's work. Additionally, Kenny has access to letters and other papers at Balliol, which have never been used by any biographer. In Kenny's biography, Clough will be re-established as one of the great Victorian poets (a judgement shared by Christopher Ricks in his 1987 Oxford Book of Victorian Verse) and also a significant personality of the Victorian stage.

Sharing what he’s learnt during half a century’s creative work, John Greening gives us an insight into the life of a poet, playwright, editor, reviewer, teacher and performer. Eminently readable, amusing and informative, A High Calling is a rich resource for anyone with an interest in good writing.

Navigating a wide-ranging career, including a spell as a children’s magician and a time at the BBC with musicologist Hans Keller, as well as years spent living in Upper Egypt, we are taken on a journey around the globe and through time and literature. With an extraordinary cast of poets, including correspondence with Ted Hughes and a meeting with Seamus Heaney at Little Gidding, Greening paints a compelling portrait of the lives behind the writers we meet.

Rich in anecdote and literary insight and interwoven with autobiographical sketches and original poems, A High Calling is anything but lofty in its approach, and is chock-full with down-to-earth advice for readers and writers.

Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize

A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time

After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carre, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.

But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, "elective affinities" and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work.

My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident. If, when I was a boy, and went forth into the world poor and friendless, a good fairy had met me and said, "Choose now thy own course through life, and the object for which thou wilt strive, and then, according to the development of thy mind, and as reason requires, I will guide and defend thee to its attainment," my fate could not, even then, have been directed more happily, more prudently, or better. The history of my life will say to the world what it says to me-There is a loving God, who directs all things for the best. My native land, Denmark, is a poetical land, full of popular traditions, old songs, and an eventful history, which has become bound up with that of Sweden and Norway. The Danish islands are possessed of beautiful beech woods, and corn and clover fields: they resemble gardens on a great scale. Upon one of these green islands, Funen, stands Odense, the place of my birth. Odense is called after the pagan god Odin, who, as tradition states, lived here: this place is the capital of the province, and lies twenty-two Danish miles from Copenhagen.

As interest in 19th-century English literature by women has been reinvigorated by a resurgence in popularity of the works of Jane Austen, readers are rediscovering a writer whose fiction, once widely beloved, fell by the wayside. British novelist ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL (1810-1865)-whose books were sometimes initially credited to, simply, "Mrs. Gaskell"-is now recognized as having created some of the most complex and progressive depictions of women in the literature of the age. Gaskell's one work of nonfiction is this 1857 biography of her close friend, novelist Charlotte Bront. At once a triumph of the biographical form and a charming celebration of the writer by someone who knew her well, this has been hailed as a remarkably insightful and highly readable life of Bront, one that makes up for its lack of objectivity with its warmth, admiration, and respect. It offers a significant view of one woman writer's perspective on another's work at a time when women writers were afforded little respect at all.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - It may seem presumptuous that so young a man as myself should propose to write his life and memoirs, for, as a rule, one waits until he has accomplished something in the world, or until he has reached old age, before he ventures to tell of the times in which he has lived, and of his part in them. But the profession to which I belong, which is that of a soldier, and which is the noblest profession a man can follow, is a hazardous one, and were I to delay until to-morrow to write down what I have seen and done, these memoirs might never be written, for, such being the fortune of war, to-morrow might not come. So I propose to tell now of the little I have accomplished in the first twenty-three years of my life, and, from month to month, to add to these memoirs in order that, should I be suddenly taken off, my debit and credit pages may be found carefully written up to date and carried forward. On the other hand, should I live to be an old man, this record of my career will furnish me with material for a more complete autobiography, and will serve as a safeguard against a failing memory.