R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1852 1936) was one of the most brilliant and mercurial characters of his day. Known as 'Don Roberto' and 'the Modern Don Quixote' because of his Spanish blood and impetuous life-style, and as 'the Uncrowned King of Scotland' because of his descent from King Robert II, he was a paradoxical man whose career was astonishingly varied. After an early period as an adventurer, when he worked as a cattle-rancher and horse-dealer in South America and Texas, he embarked on a stormy political career. He was the first socialist in Parliament, was gaoled after assailing the police at the Battle of Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday, 1887, later became the founder and president of the first Labour Party, and was eventually elected president of the Scottish National Party. Meanwhile he travelled in Morocco disguised as an Arab sheik and prospected for gold in Spain.

Book of the Week on Radio 4, and in the Observer, Sunday Times, Daily Mail and The Week 'Riveting, and immaculately written' Sunday Telegraph 'A superb psychological study of a literary genius' Business Post 'A rounded picture... and gets to Dahl's flawed, human core' Country Life 'Crisply done and well-judged' TLS Roald Dahl was one of the world's greatest storytellers. He conceived his vocation as one as intrepid as that of any explorer and, in his writing for children, he was able to tap into a child's viewpoint throughout his life. He crafted tales that were exotic in scenario, frequently invested with a moral, and filled with vibrant characters that endure in public imagination to the present day. In this brand-new biogrpahy, Matthew Dennison re-evaluates the received narrative surrounding Dahl - that of school sporting hero, daredevil pilot, and wartime spy-turned-author - and examines surviving primary resources as well as Dahl's extensive literary output to tell the story of a man who identified as a rule-breaker, an iconoclast and a romantic, both insider and outsider, hero and child's friend.

With this first volume of a two-part biography of the Transcendentalist critic and feminist leader, Margaret Fuller, Capper has launched the premier modern biography of early America's best-known intellectual woman. Based on a thorough examination of all the firsthand sources, many of them never before used, this volume is filled with original portraits of Fuller's numerous friends and colleagues and the influential movements that enveloped them. Writing with a strong narrative sweep, Capper focuses on the central problem of Fuller's life--her identity as a female intellectual--and presents the first biography of Fuller to do full justice to its engrossing subject. This first volume chronicles Fuller's "private years": her gradual, tangled, but fascinating emergence out of the "private" life of family, study, Boston-Cambridge socializing, and anonymous magazine-writing, to the beginnings of her rebirth as antebellum America's female prophet-critic.
Capper's biography is at once an evocative portrayal of an extraordinary woman and a comprehensive study of an avant-garde American intellectual type at the beginning of its first creation.

New Shakespeare biographies are published every year, though very little new documentary evidence has come to light. Inevitably speculative, these biographies straddle the line between fact and fiction. Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives explores the relationship between fiction and non-fiction within Shakespeare's biography, across a range of subjects including feminism, class politics, wartime propaganda, children's fiction, and religion, expanding beyond the Anglophone world to include countries such as Germany and Spain, from the seventeenth century to present day.

A collection of wisdom and life lessons, from the beloved and bestselling author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to my Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: it's part guidebook, part memoir, part poetry - and pure delight. 'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY 'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON

Serialized in Ford Madox Ford's English Review in 1908-9, A Personal Record (1912) both documents and fictionalizes Conrad's early life and the opening stages of his careers as a writer and as a seaman. It is also an artistic and political manifesto. This volume provides the most accurate and scholarly edition available. Mistakes introduced by typists and earlier publishers have been corrected to present the text as Conrad intended it. The introduction traces Conrad's sources and gives the history of writing and reception. The essay on the text and the apparatus set out the textual history. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify places, and gloss foreign terms. Four maps and a genealogical table supplement this explanatory material. This edition of A Personal Record, established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's reminiscences and the volume's two prefaces in forms more authoritative than any so far printed.

The definitive history of the flamboyant life of Ian Fleming and his most famous creation, James Bond. This new biography of Ian Fleming presents a fresh and illuminating portrayal of the iconic creator of James Bond. Oliver Buckton provides the first in-depth exploration of the entire process of Ian Fleming's writing-from initial conception, through composition, to his involvement in the innovative publication methods of his books. He also investigates the vital impact of Fleming's work in naval intelligence during World War Two on his later writings, especially the wartime operations he planned and executed and how they drove the plots of the James Bond novels. Buckton considers the vital role of wartime deception, disinformation, and propaganda in shaping Fleming's later techniques and imaginative creations. Offering a radically new view of Fleming's relationships with women, Buckton traces the role of strong, independent, and intelligent women such as Maud Russell, Phyllis Bottome, and his wife, Ann, on Fleming's portrayal of female characters. The book concludes with a thorough analysis of the James Bond films from Eon productions, and their influence in promoting, while also distorting, the public's recognition of Fleming's writing.

This book, first published in 1961, traces the lives and works of six outstanding Russian authors, each of whom is interesting and important in himself, as well as for his contribution to Russian letters. As personalities they are extremely varied, and also as artists, so much so that each of them might be studied as the centre of a distinct school of writing. Taken as a group they are a microcosm of Russian literature in the twentieth century, an age of rapid and extreme change.

This book, first published in 1978, demonstrates how Dostoyevsky's novels grew directly out of the pressures of their creator's tormented experience and personality. Ronald Hingley draws upon important fresh source material, which includes the definitive Soviet edition of Dostoyevsky's works with drafts and variants, Soviet research on the circumstances of his father's death, and a newly deciphered section of the diary of his second wife, Anna. Hingley considers with his analysis all Dostoyevsky's works, the ideas they contain, their varying artistic success, and their contemporary critical reception. He convincingly present's Dostoyevsky's genius at its most powerful when most on the attack.

This biographical study, first published in 1985, draws on extensive newly available material and illuminates the life and work of a man who lived through one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history to produce some of his country's greatest poetry and its most significant modern novel.

This book, first published in 1979, provides a systematic anatomy of Russia's modern authors in the context of their society at the time. Post-revolutionary Russian literature has made a profound impact on the West while still maintaining its traditional role as a vehicle for political struggle at home. Professor Hingley places their lives and work firmly in the setting of the USSR's social and political structure.

This book, first published in 1977, begins with a close look at the lives of nineteenth century Russian writers, and at the problems of their profession. It then examines their environment in its broader aspects, the Russian empire being considered from the point of view of geography, ethnography, economics, and the impact of individual Tsars on writers and society. A discussion of the main social 'estates' follows, and concluding is an analysis in their literary context of the activities of the competing forces of cohesion and disruption in imperial society: the civil service, law courts, police, army, schools, universities, press, censorship, revolutionaries and agitators. This book makes possible a fuller understanding of the works of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and the other great Russian writers.

This book, first published in 1950, is a balanced examination of Chekhov's life and work, a critical analysis of his stories and plays set against the background of his life the Russia of the day. Using Chekhov's works, biographical details, and, more importantly, his many thousands of letters, this book presents a comprehensive critical study of the writer and the man.

A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most influential writers in America. In this moving and surprising book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history - and America's. Where I Was From, in Didion's words, "represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely." The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue. Didion examines how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today - a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government. Joan Didion's unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of America's greatest writers.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION The definitive biography of America's most impassioned and lyrical twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr 'A masterpiece about a genius' Helen Mirren 'Riveting ... masterful' Sunday Times, Books of the Year On 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show's thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, 'like a farm boy in his Sunday best'. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public, Tennessee Williams's work - blood hot and personal - pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, 'a revolution' in American theatre. Tracing Williams's turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work, as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created characters so large that they have become part of American folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams's late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness, his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim and pious mother and 'mad' sister Rose, victim to one of the first lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama. Including Williams's poems, stories, journals and private correspondence in his discussion of the work - posthumously Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his day - Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively reassessment of one of America's greatest dramatists. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is the long-awaited, definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

These essays are organised into three main sections: influences upon Gascoigne, such as Skelton; Gascoigne's influence on others, including Spenser; and finally a reassessment of his critical neglect and the story behind his marginalised status in the English literary canon. As only the second multi-authored essay collection on Gascoigne, this book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of this important and often misunderstood writer.

This book, first published in 1984, was the first full biography of Solzhenitsyn. Starting with his childhood, it covers every period of his life in considerable detail, showing how Solzhenitsyn's development paralleled and mirrored the development of Soviet society: ambitious and idealistic in the twenties and thirties, preoccupied with the struggle for survival in the forties, hopeful in the fifties and sixties and disillusioned in the seventies. Solzhenitsyn's life thus serves as a paradigm for the history of twentieth-century Communism and for the intelligentsia's attitudes to Communism. At the same time, this book relates Solzhenitsyn's life to his works, all of which contain a large element of autobiography.

Josep Pla is Catalonia's foremost twentieth-century prose writer. He witnessed and wrote about some of the twentieth-century's most notable events including the Spanish Civil War and the foundation of the state of Israel. Due to a lack of translations of his work he is only now being discovered by the international audience and will soon join the ranks of major realist writers in world literature. In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer's deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual. Resina condenses Pla's forty-seven volumes of work, including travel books, narrative fiction, and history, into eleven thematic units: including time, memory, perception, life, religion, metaphysics, utopia, and self-delusion. Resina acutely explores the writer's authorial gaze and invites the reader to see the world through the eyes of one of the most underappreciated observers and writers of the twentieth-century.

PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist O, The Oprah Magazine "Best Books of Summer" selection "Magnetic nonfiction." --O, The Oprah Magazine "Remarkable insight ...[a] unique meditation/investigation...Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these." --Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wild Nights! and The Lost Landscape We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- ...Though I than He-- may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die-- Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today. Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. He lives in New York.

'I loved this book... An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times' Margaret Atwood 'Expansive and thought-provoking' Independent Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening - George Orwell Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell is said to have planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. Following his journey from the coal mines of England to taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War; from his prescient critique of Stalin to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism, Solnit finds a more hopeful Orwell, whose love of nature pulses through his work and actions. And in her dialogue with the author, she makes fascinating forays into colonial legacies in the flower garden, discovers photographer Tina Modotti's roses, reveals Stalin's obsession with growing lemons in impossibly cold conditions, and exposes the brutal rose industry in Colombia. A fresh reading of a towering figure of the 20th century which finds solace and solutions for the political and environmental challenges we face today, Orwell's Roses is a remarkable reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance. 'Luminous...It is efflorescent, a study that seeds and blooms, propagates thoughts, and tends to historical associations' New Statesman 'A genuinely extraordinary mind, whose curiosity, intelligence and willingness to learn seem unbounded' Irish Times

** Chosen as a New Statesman, Financial Times, Observer and Sunday Times Book of the Year ** A riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot's celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary. 'A rattling good story' Sunday Telegraph 'A work of art' Times Literary Supplement The Waste Land has been called the 'World's Greatest Poem'. It is said to describe the moral decay of a world after war, to find meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labelled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists - of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.

In Paris during the summer of 1814, two lovers, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, began a chronicle of their life together, starting with an account of the day they eloped to France. These journals--kept during the early years by both of them and then, after their marriage, mostly by Mary alone--are an essential source of information about the lives, both individually and together, of two major British literary figures. This critical edition, the first to be faithful to the manuscript, presents the full text of all surviving journal entries and provides extensive biographical commentary drawn from unpublished as well as published sources.