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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Literary
**LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2021** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE** **FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PLUTARCH AWARD** D. H. Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial - and we are still unsure what the verdict should be. Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. Wilson presents a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia; and, in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, shows how he speaks to us now more than ever. 'A work of art in its own right' OBSERVER 'Utterly enthralling' GEOFF DYER 'Brilliantly unconventional' RICHARD HOLMES 'A red-hot, propulsive book' THE TIMES
Curious, ruminative, and wry, this literary autobiography tours what Rachel Kushner called "the strange remove that is the life of the writer." Frank's essays cover a vast spectrum--from handling dismissive advice, facing the dilemma of thwarted ambition, and copying the generosity that inspires us, to the miraculous catharsis of letter-writing and some of the books that pull us through. Useful for writers at any stage of development, Late Work offers a seasoned artist's thinking through the exploration of issues, paradoxes, and crises of faith. Like a lively conversation with a close, outspoken friend, each piece tells its experience from the trenches.
Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, was shipped out to Paris and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention centre at La Ferte-Mace. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice. Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings' career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.
"A great read."-Whoopi Goldberg, The View How the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism continues to illuminate America's racial divide On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro," and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men continues to illuminate America's racial divide today. Born in New York City only fifteen months apart, the Harlem-raised Baldwin and the privileged Buckley could not have been more different, but they both rose to the height of American intellectual life during the civil rights movement. By the time they met in Cambridge, Buckley was determined to sound the alarm about a man he considered an "eloquent menace." For his part, Baldwin viewed Buckley as a deluded reactionary whose popularity revealed the sickness of the American soul. The stage was set for an epic confrontation that pitted Baldwin's call for a moral revolution in race relations against Buckley's unabashed elitism and implicit commitment to white supremacy. A remarkable story of race and the American dream, The Fire Is upon Us reveals the deep roots and lasting legacy of a conflict that continues to haunt our politics.
A memoir is only a slice of a life. This 'questory' (quest + history) covers more than the beloved cake-eating hippo. 'Not Just a Piece of Cake' is a candid memoir of the realistic process of the process of creativity, via anecdotes. 'Anecdultery' is a Hazel original term for story. Hazel Edwards takes the reader behind the books. She shares the humour of a diverse work style and family life behind the beloved characters like the cake-eating hippo. Hippocampus is where memories are kept. Collaborating with illustrators, performers, co-authors and even family, Hazel sharesthe process of the process of writing and why storytelling matters culturally, and personally. Of interest to: * Nostalgic fans across three generations * Aspiring writers and creators * Those interested in the process of creativity * Family/worklife time -energy balance 'Not Just a Piece of Cake' takes the reader behind the books. Collaborating with illustrators, performers, co-authors and even family. Heart tugging fan mail. Literary speed dating with characters. Dealing with the Plateau of Boredom and the Map of Serendipity. But also sharing 'the process of the process of writing' and why storytelling matters culturally, and personally. And why a 6 year old knew she wanted to be an author. A memoir is only a slice of a life. This QUESTORY ( Quest + History) which others call a memoir, covers more than the beloved cake-eating hippo.
To the world she was Agatha Christie, author of numerous bestselling mysteries and whodunits, arguably the most popular writer in the English language. But in the 1930s she wore a different hat, traveling with her husband, renowned archaeologist Max Mallowan, as he investigated the buried ruins and ancient wonders of Syria and Iraq. Described by the author as a "meandering chronicle of life on an archaeological dig," Come, Tell Me How You Live is Dame Agatha Christie's first-person account of her time spent in this breathtaking corner of the globe where recorded human history began. It is a fascinating, eye-opening, vibrant, and vivid portrait of a place, a people, and a past, by a legendary writer whose extraordinary popularity endures to this day; an altogether remarkable narrative of everyday life in a world now long since vanished.
In July 1943, the young Welsh poet and soldier Alun Lewis, already recognised as one of the outstanding writers of his generation, arrived on sick leave at the house near Madras of Freda Aykroyd, a devotee of literature and the wife of a British scientist. Lewis and Aykroyd fell in love instantly, recognising in each other similar temperaments and artistic interests. Their affair, which lasted until Lewis' mysterious death on the Arakan Front in March 1944, inspired some of the finest of his wartime poems as well as an extraordinary cache of letters published here for the first time. The letters throw fresh light on Lewis' passionate and troubled nature and the background to his literary output at a time when he was at the height of his creative powers. In her preface, Freda Aykroyd charts the haunting story of their relationship and its tragic outcome.
The definitive biography of the undisputed giant of English literature, a man whose own true history has long been hidden behind the fictional world of his books 'Compendious and compelling ... it is impossible to imagine this Life being bettered' WILLIAM BOYD, NEW STATESMAN 'Smiley himself could not have done a better job' SUNDAY TIMES Long after The Spy Who came in from the Cold made John le Carre a worldwide, bestselling sensation, David Cornwell, the man behind the pseudonym, remained an enigma. In this definitive biography, written with unprecedented access to the man himself, Adam Sisman offers an illuminating portrait of a fascinating and enigmatic writer. In Cornwell's lonely childhood, Adam Sisman uncovers the origins of the themes of love and abandonment which dominated le Carre's fiction: the departure of his mother when he was five, followed by 'sixteen hugless years' in the dubious care of his father, a man of energy and charm, a serial seducer and conman who hid the Bentleys in the trees when the bailiffs came calling - a 'totally incomprehensible father' who could 'put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket, both gestures equally sincere'. And in Cornwell's adult life - from recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, through marriage and family life, to his emergence as the master of the spy novel - Sisman explores the idea of espionage and its significance in human terms; the extent to which betrayal is acceptable in exchange for love; and the endless need for forgiveness, especially from oneself. Written with exclusive access to David Cornwell, to his private archive and to the most important people in his life - family, friends, enemies, intelligence ex-colleagues and ex-lovers - and featuring a wealth of previously unseen photographic material, Adam Sisman's extraordinarily insightful and constantly revealing biography brings in from the cold a man whose own life was as complex and confounding and filled with treachery as any of his novels. 'I'm a liar,' Cornwell once wrote. 'Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.' This is the definitive biography of a major writer, described by Richard Osman as 'just the finest, wisest storyteller we had.'
Set in the late 1960s, Mother Land describes life on an Aegean island, seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. It is the first-hand account of a Greek boy, born on a Turkish island, trying to make sense of the escalating tension between Greek and Turk, Muslim and Christian, mother and father, and reveals with chilling clarity how violence begets violence, in even the most unexpected of people and how, despite anger and exile, reconciliation is possible. Mother Land is a compulsive page-turner and this original, humane and uplifting account keeps the reader's interest to the very last page, as the adult Dmetri returns to his island home to extract one last story, to unearth one more secret, in the hope of making peace with the past.
-The only biography of Achebe, author of the most widely read book in African literature, which covers his full life up to his death in 2013 -Contains a treasure trove of interviews with Achebe, and his family, colleagues and friends -Commissioned directly by Achebe's son, in recognition of the author's considerable expertise and familiarity with Achebe and his family
The memoir of a woman who leaves her faith and her marriage and sets out to navigate the terrifying, liberating terrain of a newly mapless world Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family. But over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age forty she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence. Even though it would mean the loss of her friends, her community, and possibly even her family, Tova decides to leave her husband and her faith. After years of trying to silence the voice inside her that said she did not agree, did not fit in, did not believe, she strikes out on her own to discover what she does believe and who she really is. This will mean forging a new way of life not just for herself, but for her children, who are struggling with what the divorce and her new status as "not Orthodox" mean for them. This is a memoir about what it means to decide to heed your inner compass at long last. To free the part of yourself that has been suppressed, even if it means walking away from the only life you've ever known. Honest and courageous, Tova takes us through her first year outside her marriage and community as she learns to silence her fears and seek adventure on her own path to happiness.
Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock and many more. At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried - against his wishes - in Westminster Abbey. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. This pictorial history will shed a new and alternative light on this literary giant.
Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carre In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists - both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.
During his 1920s heyday, Arnold Bennett was one of Britain's most celebrated writers. As the author of The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger he was a household name, writing just as much for the common man as London's literati. His face was plastered over theatre hoardings and the sides of West End omnibuses. His life represents the ultimate rags-to-riches story of a man who 'banged on the door of Fortune like a weekly debt collector' as one of his obituaries so vividly put it. Yet for all his success, few were aware how cursed Bennett felt by his life-long stutter and other debilitating character traits. In the years running up to his death in 1931, his affairs were close to collapse as he fought a losing battle on three fronts: with his estranged wife; with his disenchanted mistress; and from a literary perspective with Virginia Woolf. As the first full length biography of Bennett since 1974, the work draws on a wealth of unpublished diaries and letters to shed new light on a personality who can be considered a 'Lost Icon' of early Twentieth Century Britain.
This collection of seven essays, like the carefully linked collection of vignettes within Tim O'Brien's most popular book The Things They Carried, contains multiple critical and biographical angles with recurring threads of life events, themes, characters, creative techniques, and references to all of O'Brien's books. Grounded in through research, Herzog's work illustrates how O'Brien merges his life experiences with his creative production; he rarely misses an opportunity to introduce these critical life events into his writing.
Originally published in 1962, Virginia Woolf, provides a commentary on the literary work of Virginia Woolf - examining not only her the novels, but also the considerable body of criticism surrounding her work. Along with the essential biographical details of Woolf, the books recreates the atmosphere of 'the Bloomsbury Group' and gives us a valuable insight into a very rich period of English literature, involving such figures as Leslie Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, Christopher Isherwood, David Garnett and others. The book provides a comprehensive account of Virginia Woolf's body of work and will be of interest to academics and students alike.
Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding - or creating - their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.
"The five marriages that Carmela Ciuraru explores in Lives of the Wives provide such delightfully gossipy pleasure that we have to remind ourselves that these were real people whose often stormy relationships must surely have been less fun to experience than they are for us to read about."-Francine Prose, author of The Vixen A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships. "With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life-dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp." The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it's easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude. Author Carmela Ciuraru shares the stories of five literary marriages, exposing the misery behind closed doors. The legendary British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author and critical success. In the early years of their marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being the breadwinner, and being more famous than he was. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and devote herself to her own writing. ("I really couldn't write very much when I was married to him," she once recalled, "because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn't one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean.") Surprisingly, the most traditional partnership in Lives of the Wives is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs. As this erudite and entertaining work shows, each marriage is a unique story, filled with struggles and triumphs and the negotiation of power. The Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were never sexually compatible, and it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly admired his wife's talents and championed her work. Theirs was an unhappy union, yet it fueled them creatively and enabled both to become two of Italy's most important postwar writers. These are stories of vulnerability, loneliness, infidelity, envy, sorrow, abandonment, heartbreak, and forgiveness. Above all, Lives of the Wives honors the women who have played the role of muses, agents, editors, proofreaders, housekeepers, gatekeepers, amaneunses, confidantes, and cheerleaders to literary trailblazers throughout history. In revisiting the lives of famous writers, it is time in our #MeToo era to highlight the achievements of their wives-and the price these women paid for recognition and freedom. Lives of the Wives is an insightful, humorous, and poignant exploration of the intersection of life and art and creativity and love.
Ford Madox Ford had a fascinating life, spent among several of the most important groups of artists and writers of his time. Friends with Henry James, H. G. Wells and above all Joseph Conrad, Ford was a leading figure of the avant-garde in pre-First World War London, publishing Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence in The English Review. After the warhe founded The Transatlantic Review in Paris, helping to launch Hemingway and Jean Rhys. A prolific writer in his own right, Ford's best-known books are the modernist tour de force The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade's End tetralogy (1924-8). Drawing on recently discovered correspondence and photographs, this cogent new critical biography demonstrates Ford's vital contribution to modern fiction, poetry and criticism.
At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she'd lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was willing to sacrifice everything for this goal, even swinging a pickax in a gold mine to pay the bills. When the mine shut down, she moved to the Bay Area. Armed with moxie and samples of her work, she barged into the offices of the Oakland Tribune and was hired on the spot. She went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist and household name whose column ran for over thirty years and garnered more than twenty million readers. Told in cinematic detail by bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert, Listen, World! is the inspiring story of a timeless maverick, capturing what it means to take a gamble on self-fulfillment and find freedom along the way.
DOWN TO THE SUNLESS SEA explores the time Coleridge spent in Gibraltar, Malta, Sicily and mainland Italy, where he had planned to recover his health, escape the clutches of opium and gain inspiration from the landscape; however, the reality would prove very different. After his short sojourn in Gibraltar, Coleridge arrived in Malta, where he became acquainted with the British Governor, Alexander Ball. He settled into Maltese life, initially taking on the role of acting Under-Secretary. Travelling to Sicily, Coleridge embraced the islands landscapes but was shaken to find the opium poppy was an important local crop. The Mediterranean would not prove the solution to his addiction. He visited the Consul, G. F. Leckie, and was invited to stay with him at a house on the site of Timoleon's Roman villa. The poet visited the antiquities of Syracuse and at the opera house encountered the soprano, Anna-Cecilia Bertozzi, nearly succumbing to her charms. Back in Malta, he was offered rooms in the Treasury building (now the Casino Maltese) and took up the post of Public Secretary. Legal pronouncements in Italian bear Coleridges signature. Leaving behind these matters of state, he drifted through the Italian peninsula, engaging with a coterie of artistic ex-pats when in Rome. His listless, half-hearted, and financially embarrassed attempts at the Grand Tour included a narrow escape from French troops. Coleridges Mediterranean sojourn impacted on his life and writing, not to mention his health, which saw a marked decline, leading to his final years in Highgate under the roof of a friendly doctor. Down to the Sunless Sea is a literary reflection on the fact that the sun-filled Mediterranean was not the tonic he had first imagined.
In 1903, after a fire completely destroyed her family home in Norfolk, UK, the 27- year-old Constance helped her mother redesign their house and recreate the garden. It was an experience from which she never looked back, going on to become an internationally recognised garden expert and connoisseur. A rich woman herself, she was attracted to the most spectacular and extravagant gardens in the world. From Shalimar Bagh, Lahore, to Nishat Bagh, Srinagar, to La Granja near Madrid, Constance earned her reputation studying Mughal and Moorish gardens as well as those in Great Britain, France, Italy and northern Europe. Between 1910 and 1955 she wrote about them, painted and photographed them and lectured on them. She produced two successful illustrated books, and numerous articles for magazines, including Country Life, Vogue, The Burlington Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, and The Times. When she died in 1966, she left paintings, photographs, diaries, press cuttings and scrapbooks to her grandchildren. It is upon this fascinating and hitherto unseen archive of memorabilia that Constance Villiers Stuart: In Pursuit of Paradise is based.
A reexamination of Austen's unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novels-and that challenges distinctions between her "early" and "late" work Jane Austen's six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austen's first biographer described them as "childish effusions." Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot. Examining the three manuscript volumes in which Austen collected her earliest writings, Johnston finds that Austen's regard and affection for them are revealed by her continuing to revisit and revise them throughout her adult life. The teenage works share the milieu and the humour of the novels, while revealing more clearly the sources and influences upon which Austen drew. Johnston upends the conventional narrative, according to which Austen discarded the satire and fantasy of her first writings in favour of the irony and realism of the novels. By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austen's work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all. Jane Austen, Early and Late offers a new picture of the author in all her complexity and ambiguity, and shows us that it is not necessarily true that early work yields to later, better things. |
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