Dream Song is the story of John Berryman, one of the most gifted poets of a generation that included Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas. Using Berryman's unpublished letters and poetry, as well as interviews with those who knew him intimately, Paul Mariani captures Berryman's genius and the tragedy that dogged him, while at the same time illuminating one of the most provocative periods in American letters. Here we witness Berryman's struggles with alcohol and drugs, his obsession with women and fame, and his friendships with luminary writers of the century. Mariani creates an unforgettable portrait of a poet who, by the time of his suicide at age fifty-seven, had won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Emily Dickinson may be the most widely read American poet but the story behind her work's publication in 1890 is barely known. After Emily recounts the extraordinary lives of Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham and the powerful literary legacy they shared. Mabel's complicated relationships with the Dickinsons-including her thirteen-year extramarital affair with Emily's brother, Austin-roiled the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Julie Dobrow has unearthed hundreds of primary sources to tell this compelling story and reveal the surprising impact Mabel and Millicent had on the Emily Dickinson we know today.

Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. Capper brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the major movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and he reveals how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini and many others.

From her childhood in Whitby to her long old age in Cambridge, the life of Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), novelist, autobiographer, and political activist, spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century. A self-styled Little Englander by nature, and European by nurture, equally at home, or out of place, in the North Yorkshire moors and seascape of her birth, metropolitan London, rural France, and the capitals of Central Europe, she wrote of country, cities and the exile from both with equal knowledge and sympathy. Out of the changing landscapes of her present, she fashioned her vision of the future. The title of her autobiography, Journey from the North, is a simultaneous evocation and erasure of nostalgia for lost commonality, and in her long life as writer and activist, President of wartime PEN (the association of Poets, Essayist, Novelists) committed to the values of freedom and social justice, she fought to reconcile the conflicting forms of emergent modernity. Her own journey is the generic experience of twentieth-century Britain, and the England she urges on her contemporaries is one that shares the life and mind of Europe. The present book traces the history of that shared experience. It recovers, through her writing, the aspirations and the disappointments of the generation of socialists that was Class 1914. The soldiers returning from the front in 1918, to unemployment and the General Strike of 1926, fight in 1940 alongside Frenchmen, and against Germans, who are victims of the same system: class conflict, nationalist rivalries, imperialist ambition, all for Jameson have the same defining economic horizon. At the end of the odyssey the stark alternatives take shape: Washington or Moscow, the madness of American capitalism, or the oppression of Stalinist Communism.
Alongside the narrative of Jameson's life, and the experiences as daughter, wife, and mother that shaped her personality and her career, the book explores her concern with issues of culture and society, cultural memory, and cultural landscapes, her fascination with aesthetic form and the relation of writing to politics, her insight into the materiality of words, and her persistent probing of the nature of the writing subject. It draws on unpublished archive material and brings new research on neglected areas of cultural history into conjunction with literary-critical analyses of Jameson's novels and studies of her journalism and essays. There is an extensive Bibliography of her work.

When Leonard Cohen passed away in late 2016, he left behind many who cared for and admired him, but perhaps few knew him better than longtime friend Eric Lerner. Lerner, a screenwriter and novelist, first met Cohen at a zen retreat where the two quickly bonded. The pair lost touch for a time but, ten years later, they picked up right where they left off and became practically inseparable. A powerful commitment to zen practices flowed through their friendship and allowed it to become ever deeper over time. Over the years the two shared a house and helped each other through the pains of divorce, the joys of raising children, and the ups and downs of the writing life. These two friends helped guide one another through life's myriad obstacles, and now that journey will be told from a new perspective for the first time. Well-written, funny, revealing, self-aware, and grounded, Matters of Vital Interest is a charming memoir about Lerner's relationship with his lifelong friend. His views of Cohen are unique, warm, and often funny, and in recounting these tales he reveals a touching portrait of what a deep bond between two men can truly be. Offering further insight into Cohen's idiosyncratic style, his dignified life, the way he was deeply informed by his spiritual practices, and his sensibility as a poet first, musician second, Lerner allows readers to understand a new facet of this fascinating man through the eyes of his closest friend, and in so doing continue his legacy as a captivating persona the likes of which we may never see again.

Katherine Lanpher, whose essays have appeared in the New York Times and More magazine, officially moved to Manhattan on a leap day, transferring from a rooted life in the Midwest to a new job, a new city, and a new sense of who she was. But re-invention is a tricky business and starting over in the middle of life isn't for the feint of heart. Katherine Lanpher's short essay on her first six months in New York - 'A Manhattan Admonition' was published last August in the New York Times op-ed page and remained on their list of most e-mailed stories for weeks. Now she has written a book chronicling how her past life and loves have prepared her for unexpected discoveries in her new home. Lanpher looks back on her marriage, her early days in newspapers, and her childhood in the Midwest. And, with startling insight, she examines her new world--how beauty is defined in New York, how the landscape differs from the Midwest, and how good food and books have been constants in her life.

Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father's work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain of his son's colossal publishing effort and extraordinary scholarship, readers today are therefore able to survey and understand the vastness of the landscape of Tolkien's legendarium. This collection of essays by world-renowned scholars, together with family reminiscences, sheds new light on J.R.R. Tolkien's work, his son Christopher's unique gifts in communicating and interpreting that work and the debt owed to Christopher by the many Tolkien scholars who were privileged to work with him. What was Tolkien's intended ending for 'The Lord of the Rings'? Did it leave echoes in the stripped-down version that was actually published? What was the audience's response to the first ever adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings' - a radio dramatization that has now been deleted forever from the BBC's archives? What was the significance of the extraordinary array of doorways which confronted the hobbits as they journeyed through Middle-earth? The book is illustrated with colour reproductions of J.R.R. Tolkien's manuscripts, maps, drawings and letters and, with the kind permission of his estate, photographs of Christopher Tolkien and extracts from his works, some of which have never been seen before, making this volume essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers and fans.

Ernest Hemingway nearly defined machismo for many American men of the twentieth century. Yet, in recent years critics have discerned an "androgynous" sexuality beneath the surface stoicism of Hemingway's heroes. This study breaks new ground by examining the profoundly submissive and masochistic posture toward women exhibited by many of Hemingway's heroes, from Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises "to David Bourne in "The Garden of Eden," The discussion draws on the ideas of authors as diverse as Sacher-Masoch, Freud, Deleuze, and others, and reveals that despite Hemingway's rugged and hypermasculine image, a "masochistic aesthetic" informs many of the texts. This accessible treatment of a complex subject will appeal to readers with an interest in Hemingway, gender issues, and American literature.

A smaller, cheaper edition of this acclaimed illustrated biography of Beatrix Potter. Respected biographer Sarah Gristwood discovers a life crisscrossed with contradictions and marked by tragedy, yet one that left a remarkable literary - and environmental - legacy. This illustrated biography of the beloved writer has been a strong seller and critical success. It is now available in a smaller, more affordable format. Interest in Beatrix Potter and her characters is undimmed, with the second Peter Rabbit film being released in summer 2021 and an exhibition at the V&A from February 2022, 'Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature'. Few people realise how extraordinary Beatrix Potter's own story is. She was a woman of contradictions. A sheltered Victorian daughter who grew into an astute modern businesswoman. A talented artist who became a scientific expert. A famous author who gave it all up to become a farmer, then a pioneering conservationist. Bestselling biographer Sarah Gristwood follows the twists and turns of Beatrix Potter's life and its key turning points - including her tragically brief first engagement and happy second marriage late in life. She traces the creation of Beatrix's most famous characters - including the naughty Peter Rabbit, confused Jemima Puddleduck and cheeky Squirrel Nutkin - revealing how she drew on her unusual childhood pets and locations in her beloved Lake District. A fitting legacy for a pioneering conservationist who helped save thousands of acres of the Lake District.' - The Mail on Sunday 'Excellent, anecdotal text...' - The Times Literary Supplement 'Beautifully illustrated.' - The Sunday Express

Of Joseph Conrad, H.L. Mencken has written: 'There was something almost suggesting the vastness of a natural phenomenon. He transcended all the rules. There have been perhaps, greater novelists, but I believe that he was incomparably the greatest artist whoever wrote a novel.' Originally published in 1957, the year of the centenary of Conrad's birth, and although he was firmly established among the world's great literary figures, little was known about him generally, beyond the fact that he was himself once a sailor, and that the language he handled with such mastery was not the one to which he was born. This was described as the definitive biography, written by one of Conrad's closest friends, to whom the novelist willed his personal papers. It took many years to prepare and the author travelled extensively in the lands that Conrad knew and wrote about. He writes with clarity, compassion and understanding of Conrad's childhood in Russia (where the father was exiled for Polish nationalist activities); of how the youth of fifteen, who had never seen the sea before, became a sailor; of how at twenty-nine he became a British subject and master of his own ship; of how in 1894 he became a novelist almost by accident, rose rapidly to literary fame, found new friends and established himself in literary history. This is a record of the strangest and most enigmatic of lives, fascinating and authoritative at the same time.

No writer alive today exerts the magical appeal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now, in the long-awaited first volume of his autobiography, he tells the story of his life from his birth in 1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.
Here is Garcia Marquez's shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves, Living to Tell the Tale" "is a work of enchantment.

Consistently an outsider - a child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual, a black man married to a white woman - Richard Wright nonetheless became the unparalleled voice of his time. The first full-scale biography of the author best known for his searing novels Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright: The Life and Times brings the man and his work - in all their complexity and distinction - to vibrant life. Acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's unprecedented journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to Chicago's South Side to international renown as a writer and outspoken critic of racism.Drawing on journals, letters, and eyewitness accounts, Richard Wright probes the author's relationships with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, his attraction to Communism, and his so-called exile in France. Skillfully interweaving quotes from Wright's own writings, Rowley deftly portrays a passionate, courageous, and flawed man who would become one of our most enduring literary figures.

Priceless Wisdom from a Modern Tao Te Ching Odyssey "...this book will completely absorb your attention from the beginning..." -Emanuele Pettener, PhD, assistant professor of Italian and writer in residence at Florida Atlantic University #1 New Release in Chinese Poetry, Asian Poetry, and Tao Te Ching A literary memoir like no other, Monk of Park Avenue recounts novelist and martial master Monk Yon Rou's spiritual journey of self-discovery. Learn from Yon Rou as he tackles tragedy and redemption on an unforgettable soul-searching odyssey. A spiritual journey with extraordinary encounters. Yon Rou's memoir is a kaleidoscopic ride through the upper echelons of New York Society and the nature-worshipping, sword-wielding world of East Asian religious and martial arts. Monk of Park Avenue divulges a privileged childhood in Manhattan, followed by the bitter rigors of kung fu in China and meditations in Daoist temples. Join Yon Rou's adventure as he encounters kings, Nobel laureates, and the Mob. Witness this martial master's incarceration in a high-mountain Ecuadorian hellhole and fight for survival in Paraguay's brutal thorn jungle. Meet celebrities along the way. A story of love, loss, persistence, triumph, and mastery, The Monk of Park Avenue is peopled with the likes of Milos Forman, Richard Holbrooke, Paul McCartney, Warren Beatty and now-infamous opioid purveyors, the Sackler Family. Yun Rou's memoir is no mere celebrity tell-all, but a novelist and martial master's path to self-discovery. The Monk of Park Avenue offers you: Paths for personal and spiritual growth Anecdotal stories of self-discovery and insights into how to live An eloquent, candid exploration of spiritual transformation If you loved Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, To Shake the Sleeping Self, or Lao Tzu by Ursula K. Le Guin, you'll love The Monk of Park Avenue. Also, be sure to read Monk Yon Rou's Mad Monk Manifesto, winner of both the Gold & Silver 2018 Nautilus Book Award.

Winner of the 1993 Bancroft Prize and praised in The Nation as "the richest account we have yet of Fuller's formative years," the first volume of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life was acclaimed by critics and scholars alike as the finest portrait available of Fuller's early life. Now, in the much-anticipated sequel, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age.
Capper brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the major movements of her time--from outre Boston Transcendentalism to contentious New York journalism and European revolutionary ideas. Capper describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and he reveals how she strove to articulate--through the lens of American idealism and European "experience"--a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also sheds light on Fuller's complex personal life. He offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini and provides new insights into such badly understood intimates as the shadowy James Nathan, the poetic genius Adam Mickiewicz, and Fuller's Roman lover Giovanni Ossoli. Readers will also find lively portraits of many other famous figures with whom Fuller associated, including Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Greeley, Lydia Maria Child, George Sand, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning.
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written and one of the great biographies in American history.

Byron Rogers' biography of Wales' s national poet and vicar, R.S. Thomas has been hailed as a ' masterpiece' , even as a work of ' genius' , by reviewers from Craig Brown to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Within someone considered a wintry, austere and unsociable curmudgeon, Rogers has unearthed an extremely funny story - ' riotously' so, in Rowan Williams' words. Thomas is widely considered as one of the twentieth-century' s greatest English language poets. His bitter yet beautiful collections on Wales, its landscape, people and identity, reflect a life of political and spiritual asceticism. Indeed, Thomas is a man who banned vacuum cleaners from his house on grounds of noise, whose first act on moving into an ancient cottage was to rip out the central heating, and whose attempts to seek out more authentically Welsh parishes only brought him more into contact with loud English holidaymakers. To Thomas' s many admirers this will be a surprising, sometimes shocking, but at last humanising portrait of someone who wrote truly metaphysical poetry.

Cold Cream is a sparkling autobiography in the great tradition: wonderfully perceptive, exquisitely rendered and bursting with characters and anecdotes of every shade and hue. A tender, moving and witty portrait of Ferdinand Mount's family and his early life, it follows his bumbling path from his decadent upbringing in the world of 'Hobohemia' to his schooldays at Eton, and from the boozy depths of Fleet Street in the 60s to his years at the vortex of Downing Street in the 80s as speech writer (much to his own bemusement) for Margaret Thatcher. Every sentence radiates with fondness, intelligence and humour in this utterly charming anthology of an eccentric and colourful cast of people who defined their generation.

Counterculture icon and best-selling author of the anti-authoritarian novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey said he was ""too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie."" It's All a Kind of Magic is the first biography of Kesey. It reveals a youthful life of brilliance and eccentricity that encompassed wrestling, writing, magic and ventriloquism, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory drugs, and a notable cast of characters that would come to include Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson. A child of the Depression, Kesey was born in 1935 to a migrant farming family that settled in Oregon during World War II. Based on meticulous research and many interviews with friends and family, Rick Dodgson's biography documents Kesey's early life, from his time growing up in Oregon as a farm boy and wrestling champion through his college years, his first drug experiences, and the writing of his most famous books. While a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kesey worked the night shift at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital, where he earned extra money taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs for medical studies. Soon he and his bohemian crowd of friends were using the same substances to conduct their own experiments, exploring the frontiers of their minds and testing the boundaries of their society. With the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey moved to La Honda, California, in the foothills of San Mateo County, creating a scene that Hunter S. Thompson remembered as the ""world capital of madness."" There, Kesey and his growing band of Merry Prankster friends began hosting psychedelic parties and living a ""hippie"" lifestyle before anyone knew what that meant. Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test mythologised Kesey's adventures in the 1960s. Illustrated with rarely seen photographs, It's All a Kind of Magic depicts a precocious young man brimming with self-confidence and ambition who-through talent, instinct, and fearless spectacle-made his life into a performance, a wild magic act that electrified American and world culture.

The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters is a narrative and epistolary biography drawn from the unpublished lifelong correspondence exchanged among four brothers: Charles Chauncy, Edward Bliss, Ralph Waldo, and William Emerson. This is an extensive correspondence, for not counting Waldo's previously published letters, there are 768 letters exchanged among the brothers and an additional 483 unpublished letters from the brothers to their aunt Mary Moody Emerson, mother Ruth Haskins Emerson, and Charles' fiancee Elizabeth Hoar, among others.
While lesser figures might have faltered under the burden of having been born an Emerson, with social, political, and ecclesiastic roots extending back to the first century of New England settlement, the brothers' letters reveal that all were invigorated by a shared sense of origin and aspired to make a significant reputation for themselves. Across six richly developed chapters, the signal events and friendships that shaped the Emerson brothers' lives are strung together to reveal a remarkable family culture. For the first time, The Emerson Brothers treats the illustrious history of the Emerson family in America as a foreshadowing of expectations the brothers inherited; defines the extent of Waldo's debt to William for his encounter with German Biblical Criticism; develops Charles' and Edward's incredibly promising but ultimately tragic lives; examines the profound emotional and intellectual impact of Aunt Mary on the younger Emersons; considers the three-year courtship between Charles and Elizabeth Hoar in the context of Waldo's own marriages; and studies the brothers' preoccupation with financial security for "the family"(revealing, too, that finances were at least as powerful a motivation behind Waldo's 1832 resignation from Boston's Second Church as were the death of his first wife and his religious doubts).
This biography approaches Waldo's inner life in a way that makes him a figure to imagine personally by portraying him in relation to his brothers who are his intellectual equals. It offers an imaginative social and cultural history of one of our oldest and most gifted families, unique players in a period often considered to be the "American Renaissance."

Autobiography of Mark Twain (1907) is a collection of autobiographical writings by American humorist Mark Twain. Dictated toward the end of his life, the Autobiography of Mark Twain is a series of brief reflections on 74 years of fame, hard work, and adventure by an icon of American literature. Originally serialized in the North American Review, the United States' oldest literary magazine, the Autobiography of Mark Twain has gone through countless editions in the century after Twain's death, and is considered a masterpiece of literary nonfiction. "I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published [...] because of its form and method-a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel." Focusing on the small events, unremarkable encounters, and marginalia which make a life both common and particular, Mark Twain envisions a model of autobiography capable of dispelling the myth of the writer as a man of fortune and mysterious talent. Capturing episodes from his youth and the early stages of his writing career, reflecting on the importance of his wife Olivia and daughter Susy, and describing the influence of labor on his philosophy of life, Twain invites his reader to recognize him not just as Samuel Clemens, his birth name, but as a man who lived and worked and triumphed and suffered alongside others, as a man whose success was a testament to the power of community. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Mark Twain's Autobiography of Mark Twain is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.