William Beckford had two lives: one real and sensational, the other an elegant forgery he invented in retirement after the young Disraeli mischievously sent him a homoerotic epic based loosely on Beckford's own career. Biographers have been bemused by Beckford's faked letters and dream encounters with celebrities, but his real life was far more significant: he is the pivotal Romantic between Horace Walpole and Byron.

Beckford was reared in exotic isolation in a Palladian palace where he grew up obsessed with dark grottoes, towers and images of the living dead. Rushed into marriage by an apprehensive mother, he indulged his actual passions (both legal and paedophile) until a Tory administration staged a sex scandal that exiled him. In his absence his novel, Vathek was treacherously pirated. Returned to England, Beckford flung his wealth into the creation of Fonthill Abbey, which, by its shadowy vistas and glamorous camp furnishings, paved the way for the wildest excesses of Victorian taste.

' Edward] FitzGerald (1809-1883) won a small piece of immortality with his translation-adaptation of "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.".. but in every other way he seems to have successfully avoided fulfilment. A godless Epicurean, he lived in permanent virginity, never pressing his homosexual desires beyond a number of sentimental crushes... The son of a fabulously rich heiress, he rarely travelled... Though he had many friends he also had a perverse penchant for alienating them... Robert Bernard] Martin argues that FitzGerald's greatest achievement, outside the "Rubaiyat," is his letters, which certainly have grace and a wistful charm.' "Kirkus Review"

'There is ] something sad about the life of this loving and never quite satisfied man... Mr. Martin's biography is splendid reading, and it is a real credit to it that he makes us feel the sadness.' "New York Times"

First published in 1935, Eleanor Farjeon's A Nursery in the Nineties is one of the most striking accounts of childhood ever written: a testament to a happy and creative upbringing from an author rightly renowned for her powerfully imaginative books for children. 'Nellie' was born in 1881, her father a popular novelist, her mother from a famous American acting family. She was never sent to school, was often in poor health and developed a crushing self-consciousness in company. The nursery at home therefore marked the limits of her universe through her formative years; yet it was in this hothouse atmosphere that 'Nellie' began to read, write stories and, with her three brothers, evolve the rituals and games that dominated their lives. Though she later admitted that such experience hampered her mature development, her imagination certainly flourished, a gift that was soon to communicate itself to legions of readers.

'For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door And Leerie stops to light it, as he lights so many more...' The picture of a small boy peering from a window at dusk to watch the lamplighter in the street is one of the enduring images of 19th-century Edinburgh, and the child probably the most famous ever brought up there. Robert Louis Stevenson loved to conjure up a dashing, romantic lineage for himself, dreaming that he was descended from the colourful outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. The reality was less flamboyant but no less remarkable and he would learn that the street lamps of Edinburgh owed their brilliance to the scientific work of his own great-grandfather. This welcome addition to the Robert Louis Stevenson canon gives a concise account of his life - his family background, childhood and adolescence in a Calvinist, hard-working household in Scotland, his travels in three continents and his final years in the South Seas.It examines his relationships with his parents and his nurse, with English and American friends, particularly the family into which he married, and with the Samoan islanders among whom he died at the age of 44. Stevenson's childhood experiences and Scottish identity fed his fertile imagination wherever he found himself. His legacy includes travel writing, essays and poetry, and novels such as "Treasure Island", "Kidnapped", "The Master of Ballantrae", "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", "St Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston", still read and enjoyed more than one hundred years after his death. "Robert Louis Stevenson: The Travelling Mind" is an insightful introduction to the life and work of one of the world's best-loved writers.

A superbly crafted study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance. Savage Journey is a "supremely crafted" study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson's influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Although Thompson's political commentary was often hyperbolic, Richardson shows that much of it was also prophetic. Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.

"After Pusan," first published in 1995, is the third panel (alongside "Blindfold Games" and "Coastwise Lights," also in Faber Finds) of a triptych of memoirs by Alan Ross. Inspired by Ross's visit in 1986 to the South Korean coastal city of Pusan, like its predecessors it gracefully entwines poetry and prose.

'"After Pusan" opens with a thirty-page prose memoir of Ross's] visit, economically and self-effacingly told, deft in its detail and tireless in its curiosity... This memoir is more than merely an adjunct to Ross's other travel writings, though, and more than only a prelude to the poems which fill the rest of these hundred pages. "After Pusan" breaks a long silence in his life as a poet; and it was that visit to Korea... that suggested to him 'that if poetry was ever going to come again it might do so now.' "PN Review"

Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx's piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there."Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it--a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house--with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region--inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians--and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

Her looks attracted Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. Among her friends were Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The 1930s she spent in penury, writing fiction, biography and verse. Only when Yeats hailed her as 'a major poet' did her work reach a wider audience, whereupon Edith Sitwell set off to conquer New York and Hollywood. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, this is the definitive portrait of a spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman. 'The excellence of Mrs Glendinning's book is that it remains wise and balanced while never sacrificing critical edge... It's hard to imagine a life of Edith Sitwell that could surpass it.' John Carey, Sunday Times

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writings Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produced them. Scott Peeples chronicles Poe's rootless life in the cities, neighborhoods, and rooms where he lived and worked, exploring how each new place left its enduring mark on the writer and his craft. Poe wrote short stories, poems, journalism, and editorials with urban readers in mind. He witnessed urban slavery up close, living and working within a few blocks of slave jails and auction houses in Richmond and among enslaved workers in Baltimore. In Philadelphia, he saw an expanding city struggling to contain its own violent propensities. At a time when suburbs were just beginning to offer an alternative to crowded city dwellings, he tried living cheaply on the then-rural Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later in what is now the Bronx. Poe's urban mysteries and claustrophobic tales of troubled minds and abused bodies reflect his experiences living among the soldiers, slaves, and immigrants of the American city. Featuring evocative photographs by Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd challenges the popular conception of Poe as an isolated artist living in a world of his own imagination, detached from his physical surroundings. The Poe who emerges here is a man whose outlook and career were shaped by the cities where he lived, longing for a stable home.

'Jan Marsh's book is the best researched and fullest biography of Rossetti we have yet had.' Fiona MacCarthy, New York Review of Books 'Although never formally part of the Pre-Raphaelite poetic school, which included her brother Gabriel, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne, Christina Rossetti has always been linked to it. [Jan Marsh] gives full attention to both the individual and her unique variety of fantastic and devotional poetry... Marsh delineates an appealing person while examining her adolescent nervous breakdown, abortive engagement to a lapsed Catholic painter, frustrated love for an absentminded scholar, and relationships with her devout but hearty sister, Maria, and with her brothers... The author's steady, sympathetic course through Rossetti's divided life enables readers to delve into the intense and original self most fully expressed in her poetry.' Kirkus Review

One of Germany's greatest living writers offers up an analysis (and samples) of his failed projects. "My dear fellow artists, whether writers, actors, painters, film-makers, singers, sculptors, or composers, why are you so reluctant to talk about your minor or major failures?" With that question, Hans Magnus Enzensberger-the most senior among Germany's great writers-begins his amusing ruminations on his favorite projects that never saw the light of day. There is enlightenment in every embarrassing episode, he argues, and while artists tend to forget their successes quickly, the memory of a project that came to nothing stays in the mind for years, if not decades. Triumphs hold no lessons for us, but fiascos can extend our understanding, giving insight into the conditions of production, conventions, and practices of the industries concerned, and helping novices to assess the snares and minefields in the industry of their choice. What's more, Enzensberger argues, flops have a therapeutic effect: They can cure, or at least alleviate, the vocational illnesses of authors, be it the loss of control or megalomania. In Gone but Not Forgotten, Enzensberger looks back at his uncompleted experiments not just in the world of books but also in cinema, theater, opera, and journal publishing, and shares with us a "store of ideas" teeming with sketches of still-possible projects. He also reflects on the likely reasons for these big and small defeats. Interspersed among his ruminations are excerpts from those experiments, giving readers a taste of what we missed. Together, the pieces in this volume build a remarkable picture of a versatile genius's range of work over more than half a century and make us reflect on the very nature of success and failure by which we measure our lives.

In 1988 Hugo Williams began to pen his 'Freelance' column for the Times Literary Supplement: a window that allowed him to exhibit the full panoply of his gifts as travel writer, literary portraitist, working poet, and all-round chronicler of the curious existence of the contemporary writer. Freelancing is a collection of these TLS columns that finds Williams variously in Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem, Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. In the course of events he sees his Selected Poems published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. He reads and teaches, as most poets do, but also strolls through Paris dressed as Marlene Dietrich, encounters some of the great and good, and explores his personal history. His account of these adventures, reflections and discoveries is elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant.

Prior to the First World War T.E. Hulme was one of the most original and striking creative personalities in England, strongly admired by both Pound and Eliot. Yet he died in 1917, virtually unknown. A key figure in the genesis of Modernism, Hulme mixed among a great range of gifted artists and was never shy of courting controversy. Unusually among poets of his generation, he was convinced of the rightness of Britain's role in the war (and criticised Bertrand Russell for his pacifism.)

Robert Ferguson offers the first modern biography of Hulme, drawing upon access to Hulme's papers and later interviews with his associates.

'A humane, comprehensive biography... By the end, Ferguson's final judgment of his subject - 'the conservative character at its best' - seems justified.' Jeremy Noel-Todd, "Observer"

Here is the essential reference for fans of Elisabeth Ogilvie's books -- and a wonderful introduction to one of Maine's most prolific writers.

Bohemian, egoist and prophet of sensualism, Henry Miller remains to many writers and readers a literary lion. Born in Brooklyn in 1891, son of a tailor of German extraction, Miller would embrace a freewheeling existence that carried him through umpteen jobs and sexual encounters, providing rich source material for the novels he would write. Greenwich Village and Paris in the 1920s offered rich pickings, as did Miller's ten-year affair with Anais Nin. But he was 69 before "Tropic of Cancer" was legally published in the US and made him famous, almost 30 years from its composition and long after his peers had devoured it in contraband French editions.

Robert Ferguson reveals Miller as a amalgam of vulnerability and insouciance, who endured thirty years of official opprobrium but won the respect of Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Lawrence Durrell, and readers by the thousand.

'This impressive biography is] good, dirty fun.' "Observer"

'Engaging and perceptive.' "Economist"

'Lively and entertaining.' J.G. Ballard

Emile Zola was the leader of the literary movement known as 'naturalism' and is one of the great figures of the novel. In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy. In this Very Short Introduction, Brian Nelson examines Zola's major themes and narrative art. He illuminates the social and political contexts of Zola's work, and provides readings of five individual novels (The Belly of Paris, L'Assommoir, The Ladies' Paradise, Germinal, and Earth). Zola's naturalist theories, which attempted to align literature with science, helped to generate the stereotypical notion that his fiction was somehow nonfictional. Nelson, however, reveals how the most distinctive elements of Zola's writing go far beyond his theoretical naturalism, giving his novels their unique force. Throughout, he sets Zola's work in context, considering his relations with contemporary painters, his role in the Dreyfus Affair, and his eventual murder. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In this richly detailed biography Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day) whose literary achievements were matched by her tremendous talent for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland to Oxford (where she met Yeats and Eliot), through her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, to her friendships with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Glendinning lifts the veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her novels. 'One of the best critical biographies to have come my way for some time... A beautifully composed portrait.' Sunday Telegraph 'It reads like a good novel.' Irish Times

In this, the companion volume to his earlier autobiographical Apostate (1926), Forrest Reid continues his 'chronicle of a prolonged personal adventure'. Private Road (first published in 1940) offers Reid's descriptions of his early writing efforts; a youthful correspondence with Henry James that began with promise yet ended disappointingly ('the Master was not pleased...'); his Cambridge encounters with such luminaries as Ronald Firbank and W.B. Yeats; the production and reception of his first published works; and his valued friendships with E.M. Forster and Walter de la Mare. The closing stages of the book reflect Reid's unique sense of the spiritual: a compelling meditation on our 'second life' in a place Reid calls 'dreamland', wherein a 'shadowy agent' conjures an atmosphere that can hold powerful inspirational properties for the artist. Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost/neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog faberfindsblog.co.uk. Normal 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */

Longtime fans of Rich's writing will welcome this engaging and thoughtful biography of her life. There is also a wonderful section that includes many of Rich's essays and stories -- which were published in magazines but never appeared in book form -- as well as excerpts from her journal and letters.

Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, "Lord Weary's Castle," won the Pulitzer Prize. With "Life Studies," his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill.

'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James

'A searing, triumphant story. A testament to the tenacity of the human spirit as well as a beautiful ode to an iconic figure' IRENOSEN OKOJIE Letters to Gil is Malik Al Nasir's profound coming of age memoir - the story of surviving physical and racial abuse and discovering a new sense of self-worth under the wing of the great artist, poet and civil rights activist Gil Scott-Heron. Born in Liverpool, Malik was taken into care at the age of nine after his seafaring father became paralysed. He would spend his adolescence in a system that proved violent, neglectful, exploitative, traumatising and mired in abuse. Aged eighteen, he emerged semi-literate, penniless with no connections or sense of where he was going - until a chance meeting with Gil Scott-Heron. Letters to Gil will tell the story of Malik's empowerment and awakening while mentored by Gil, from his introduction to the legacy of Black history to the development of his voice through poetry and music. Written with lyricism and power, it is a frank and moving memoir, highlighting how institutional racism can debilitate and disadvantage a child, as well as how mentoring, creativity, self-expression and solidarity helped him to uncover his potential.

"'I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit...'"

""

Born in Belfast in 1875, Forrest Reid would earn a reputation as 'the first Ulster novelist of European stature.' He studied at Cambridge, but it was Belfast where Reid returned to make his home, and where his questing mind seemed to find all that it required of inspiration. As he writes in "Apostate" (1926), the first of two volumes of autobiography - "'The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.'"

A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney's work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney's evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney's cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney's life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.

'Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.' John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet Hopkins is today a huge figure in English literature. Homosexual but terribly repressed, he channeled his emotions toward nature and God, with profound results. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells this extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, to his struggle in later years to retain his very sanity. 'In Martin, the unhappy and tormented genius has found the most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter... [The book] goes to the heart of Hopkins, and plants him firmly before us as a Victorian, and a great one.' Allan Massie, Sunday Telegraph 'Martin follows Hopkins through his toils with sympathy and a great unshowy command of the facts. In this magnificently solicitous biography he has re-established the contours of the story definitively and made the homosexual drama integral to the better-known drama of conversion and poetics.' Seamus Heaney, Independent on Sunday 'The triumph of this learned, scrupulously detailed and persuasive biography is that it brings the reader as near as it is perhaps possible to come to living Hopkins' life, to sensing the mysterious crushing pressures that were for him intimately bound up with the richness and complexity of his writing.' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

"A shapely experiment, mixing memoir with biography . . . [Elizabeth Bishop] fuses sympathy with intelligence, sending us back to Bishop's marvelous poems." -- Wall Street Journal Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America's most revered poets. And yet she has never been fully understood as a woman and artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop's letters to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares. By alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Megan Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader an original and compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined. "Marshall is a skilled reader who points out the telling echoes between Bishop's published and private writing. Her account is enriched by a cache of revelatory, recently discovered documents . . . Marshall's narrative is smooth and brisk: an impressive feat." -- New York Times Book Review