John Updike's Early Years first examines his family, then places him in the context of the Depression and World War II. Relying upon interviews with former classmates, the next chapters examine Updike's early life and leisure activities, his athletic ability, social leadership, intellectual prowess, comical pranks, and his experience with girls. Two chapters explore Updike's cartooning and drawing, and the last chapter explains how he modeled his characters on his schoolmates. Lists of Updike's works treating Pennsylvania, and a compilation of contributions to his school paper are included, along with profiles of all students, faculty and administrators during his years at Shillington High School.

My struggle with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), during my first six years in the United States, is an inspiring story for every immigrant who wishes to become legally a permanent resident and ultimately an American citizen.

Understanding the rules and regulations of the INS and fighting them effectively on their own turf, is the key to success for every immigrant who wishes to settle legally in the United States. Proper legal advice and guidance, coupled with determination to achieve your goal, are the fundamentals of making your dream come true.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said: "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

"At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the contexts of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death" --

Blue Suburbia is a searing memoir so fresh, original, and honest that it will break your heart and renew your faith in the human spirit.

With each spare stroke of her pen, Laurie Lico Albanese paints a vivid portrait of the blue-collar landscape of her childhood -- rusted swing sets, auto body shops, greasy hands, home improvements -- taking readers along for the wild, treacherous ride that leads to her escape. Her mother may stand silently at the sink year after year, or lie in the basement weeping, but Albanese is determined to flee the deadening certainty of her parents' lives. Her story does not disappoint us.

By turns haunting, hilarious, tragic, and romantic, Blue Suburbia is the chronicle of a determined young woman who overcomes family limitations, socio-economic obstacles, and personal fears to build a happy -- and blessedly ordinary -- life. Written entirely in free verse, Blue Suburbia's cadence is a steady, rhythmic heartbeat, pulsing with pain, rebellion, love, and triumph. This is the story many of us might tell, if we had the courage.

Barbara Hepworth sculpted outdoors and Janet Frame wore earmuffs as she worked to block out noise. Kate Chopin wrote with her six children ‘swarming around her’ whereas the artist Rosa Bonheur filled her bedroom with the sixty birds that inspired her work. Louisa May Alcott wrote so vigorously – skipping sleep and meals – that she had to learn to write with her left hand to give her cramped right hand a break.

From Isak Dinesen subsisting on oysters, champagne and amphetamines, to Isabel Allende's insistence that she begins each new book on 8 January, here are the working routines of over 140 brilliant female painters, composers, sculptors, writers, filmmakers and performers.

Filled with details of the large and small choices these women made, Daily Rituals Women at Work is a source of fascination and inspiration.

This long-awaited biography provides a fascinating and comprehensive picture of Garcia Marquez's life up to the publication of his classic "100 Years of Solitude." Based on nearly a decade of research, this biographical study sheds new light on the life and works of the Nobel Laureate, father of magical realism, and bestselling author in the history of the Spanish language. As Garcia Marquez's impact endures on well into his ninth decade, Stavans's keen insights constitute the definitive re-appraisal of the literary giant's life and corpus. The later part of his life will be covered in a second book.

In the late 1890s, Vartanoosh Tarzian escapes with her parents from Turkish massacres in their province of Erzeroum, Armenia, to Beirut, the little girl and her brother riding in saddlebags on a camel. Left in Syria in the care of a bachelor uncle while her mother emigrates to America and her father travels to England for medical treatment, she finally rejoins her mother in New York City in 1903. Vartanoosh is placed in The Sheltering Arms, an Episcopal home for "half-orphans" in what is now Harlem, where she learns to speak, write and read English and is taught American customs and hygiene. Returning to her parents' home, she comes to know Thomas Alva Edison while working in their tailor shop in Orange, New Jersey. Although her dream is to become a nurse, her parents insist that she marry, which she does in 1913, shepherding her family of six children through two World Wars and the Depression. "VARTANOOSH" is the true story of a remarkable, independent woman, told amidst a rich tapestry of Armenian customs and life in Armenia and America.

This is the first biography to concentrate exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational friendships with the key women in her life, including the caregivers of her Victorian childhood who instilled in her a lifelong struggle between creativity and convention: her taciturn sister, Vanessa Bell; enigmatic artist Dora Carrington; complex writer Katherine Mansfield; independent novelist Vita Sackville-West; and riotous, militant composer Ethel Smyth.

'Sympathetic and wonderfully perceptive . . . a heartbreaking read' NICK COHEN, Critic 'Wise, witty and empathetic . . . outstanding' JIM CRACE 'A fascinating treatment of the age-old problem of writers and drink which displays the same subtle qualities as William Palmer's own undervalued novels' D. J. TAYLOR An 'enjoyable exploration of an enduringly fascinating subject . . . [Palmer] is above all a dispassionate critic, and is always attentive to, and unwaveringly perceptive about the art of his subjects as well as their relationship with alcohol . . . [his] treatment is even-handed and largely without judgement. He tries to understand, without either condoning or censuring, the impulses behind often reprehensible behaviour' SOUMYA BHATTACHARYA, New Statesman 'A vastly absorbing and entertaining study of this ever-interesting subject' ANDREW DAVIES, screenwriter and novelist 'In Love with Hell is a fascinating and beautifully written account of the lives of eleven British and American authors whose addiction to alcohol may have been a necessary adjunct to their writing but ruined their lives. Palmer's succinct biographies contain fine descriptions of the writers, their work and the times they lived in; and there are convincing insights into what led so many authors to take to drink.' PIERS PAUL READ Why do some writers destroy themselves by drinking alcohol? Before our health-conscious age it would be true to say that many writers drank what we now regard as excessive amounts. Graham Greene, for instance, drank on a daily basis quantities of spirits and wine and beer most doctors would consider as being dangerous to his health. But he was rarely out of control and lived with his considerable wits intact to the age of eighty-six. W. H. Auden drank the most of a bottle of spirits a day, but also worked hard and steadily every day until his death. Even T. S. Eliot, for all his pontifical demeanour, was extremely fond of gin and was once observed completely drunk on a London Tube station by a startled friend. These were not writers who are generally regarded as alcoholics. 'Alcoholic' is, in any case, a slippery word, as exemplified by Dylan Thomas's definition of an alcoholic as 'someone you dislike who drinks as much as you.' The word is still controversial and often misunderstood and misapplied. What acclaimed novelist and poet William Palmer's book is interested in is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the whole private and social world of the drinker in their work. He looks at Patrick Hamilton ('the feverish magic that alcohol can work'); Jean Rhys ('As soon as I sober up I start again'); Charles Jackson ('Delirium is a disease of the night'); Malcolm Lowry ('I love hell. I can't wait to go back there'); Dylan Thomas ('A womb with a view'); John Cheever ('The singing of the bottles in the pantry'); Flann O'Brien ('A pint of plain is your only man'); Anthony Burgess ('Writing is an agony mitigated by drink'); Kingsley Amis ('Beer makes you drunk'); Richard Yates ('The road to Revolutionary Road'); and Elizabeth Bishop ('The writer's writer's writer').

Regarded as a titanic artistic and aesthetic achievement, the influential literary magazine The Dial published most of the great modernist writers, artists, and critics of its day. As publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926, Scofield Thayer was gatekeeper and guide for the movement. His editorial curation introduced the ideas of literary modernism to America and gave American artists a new audience in Europe. In The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer James Dempsey looks beyond the public figure best known for publishing the work of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore to reveal a paradoxical man fraught with indecisions and insatiable appetites, and deeply conflicted about the artistic movement to which he was benefactor and patron. Thayer suffered from schizophrenia and faded from public life upon his resignation from The Dial. His struggle with mental illness and his controversial personal life led his guardians to prohibit anything of a personal nature from appearing in previous biographies. The story of Thayer's unmoored and peripatetic life, which in many ways mirrored the cosmopolitan rootlessness of modernism, has never been fully told until now.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The complexity of Stevens's poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read.

This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world. Based on extensive research and oral testimony, this biography embraces postcolonial realities and promise, and is a major contribution to British cultural history. -- .

Throughout his life, James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might, he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Boswell's Enlightenment examines the conflicting credos of reason and faith, progress and tradition that pulled Boswell, like so many eighteenth-century Europeans, in opposing directions. In the end, the life of the man best known for writing Samuel Johnson's biography was something of a patchwork affair. As Johnson himself understood: "That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL." Few periods in Boswell's life better crystallize this internal turmoil than 1763-1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky's thrilling intellectual adventure. From the moment Boswell sailed for Holland from the port of Harwich, leaving behind on the beach his newly made friend Dr. Johnson, to his return to Dover from Calais a year and a half later, the young Scot was intent on not just touring historic and religious sites but also canvassing the views of the greatest thinkers of the age. In his relentless quizzing of Voltaire and Rousseau, Hume and Johnson, Paoli and Wilkes on topics concerning faith, the soul, and death, he was not merely a celebrity-seeker but-for want of a better term-a truth-seeker. Zaretsky reveals a life more complex and compelling than suggested by the label "Johnson's biographer," and one that 250 years later registers our own variations of mind.

"Parties are the nightly ritual of sophisticated society. I find it fascinating that Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966 has become one of those legendary parties that exemplifies the ritual as a part of social and literary history. How beautifully Bedorah Davis has recounted the creation and execution of Truman's ball in minute and dishy detail. The ball marked the very peak of his dazzling literary career and the beginning of the literary downfall from which he never recovered. I knew Truman, and I was riveted by Davis's book."
--Dominick Dunne, author of "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and An Inconvenient Woman"

"Deborah Davis captures a crystal moment in time with all the elegance and irony it deserves. A black and white truffle of a book--delicious."
--Jane Stanton Hitchcock, author of "One Dangerous Lady and Social Crimes"

"In this extraordinary book, Deborah Davis tells the story of how international society and the 1960s converged at the Plaza Hotel at the party of the century. It was a moment in time and Davis captures the excitement in delicious detail. I loved this book."
--Ina Garten, author of the "Barefoot Contessa" cookbooks

"Davis shines a kaleidoscopically colorful light on the Black and White Ball, a cultural happening that defined the time. Immersing oneself in these pages is the next best thing to being there."
--Jill Kargman, coauthor of "The Right Address and Wolves in Chic Clothing"

"One of the best reads of the season will be Deborah Davis's Party of the Century, an encyclopedic look at the famous Black and White Ball."
--Billy Norwich, "Vogue"

This is a biography of the influential poet and illustrator, Ralph Hodgson. Profusely illustrated with many of Hodgson's original cartoons and line-drawings, the book is sure to capture yet another generation of readers for Hodgson's timeless verse.