'Do you like the truth? It is well for you. Adhere to that preference - never swerve thence.' - Charlotte Bronte, 'Shirley' The Jenkins family knew the Brontes in Brussels and West Yorkshire. Eager to learn about them, their descendant read the Bronte biographies, and discovered that no one had researched this family, and, worse, that what was written was fabricated, with one biographer copying another, embroidering, even making up dialogue. Yet Mrs Gaskell had deliberately sought out Mrs Jenkins when researching her famous Life of Charlotte. If it had not been for Mrs Jenkins, Charlotte would never have gone to Brussels, never met M. Heger. There would be no 'Villette', no 'Jane Eyre'. This book purges the lies and identifies one of Charlotte's characters for the first time. It reveals a thrumming wire that connects Byron to Trollope to Henry James, and gives further evidence of the adultery of William Wordsworth's eldest son. Above all, it gives a radical new perspective on the inspiration for Charlotte's novels and those vital two years she spent in Brussels.

Natasha Trethewey was born in Mississippi in the 60s to a black mother and a white father. When she was six, Natasha's parents divorced, and she and her mother moved to Atlanta. There, her mother met the man who would become her second husband, and Natasha's stepfather. While she was still a child, Natasha decided that she would not tell her mother about what her stepfather did when she was not there: the quiet bullying and control, the games of cat and mouse. Her mother kept her own secrets, secrets that grew harder to hide as Natasha came of age. When Natasha was nineteen and away at college, her stepfather shot her mother dead on the driveway outside their home. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence, and a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Luminous, urgent, and visceral, it cements Trethewey's position as one of the most important voices in America today.

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career-from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank's unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times. The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.

The extraordinary untold story of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous secret life in espionage A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A finalist for the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award "IMPORTANT" (Wall Street Journal) * "FASCINATING" (New York Review of Books) * "CAPTIVATING" (Missourian) A riveting international cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold War America, and the Cuban Revolution, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway's secret adventures in espionage and intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s (including his role as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo"), a hidden chapter that fueled both his art and his undoing. While he was the historian at the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and Oxford-trained historian, began to uncover clues suggesting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and shocking relationship that was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with risks than has ever been previously supposed. Now Reynolds's meticulously researched and captivating narrative "looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before" (London Review of Books), revealing for the first time the whole story of this hidden side of Hemingway's life: his troubling recruitment by Soviet spies to work with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, followed in short order by a complex set of secret relationships with American agencies. Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces during the 1930s, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion in the life-and-death world of the revolutionary left, from his passionate commitment to the Spanish Republic; his successful pursuit by Soviet NKVD agents, who valued Hemingway's influence, access, and mobility; his wartime meeting in East Asia with communist leader Chou En-Lai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China; and finally to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels in the late 1950s and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds equally explores Hemingway's participation in various roles as an agent for the United States government, including hunting Nazi submarines with ONI-supplied munitions in the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar; his command of an informant ring in Cuba called the "Crook Factory" that reported to the American embassy in Havana; and his on-the-ground role in Europe, where he helped OSS gain key tactical intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought alongside the U.S. infantry in the bloody endgame of World War II. As he examines the links between Hemingway's work as an operative and as an author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway's secret adventures influenced his literary output and contributed to the writer's block and mental decline (including paranoia) that plagued him during the postwar years -- a period marked by the Red Scare and McCarthy hearings. Reynolds also illuminates how those same experiences played a role in some of Hemingway's greatest works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, while also adding to the burden that he carried at the end of his life and perhaps contributing to his suicide. A literary biography with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life, work, and fate of one of America's most legendary authors.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the Lives of Victorian Literary Figures series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors. Diary extracts, letters, memoirs and other ephemeral material allows scholars to see these figures through the eyes of their contemporaries. These early accounts shed a different light on their personalities and reputations than more recent portrayals.

Thomas Hardy Remembered assembles some 150 annotated interviews and recollections of Hardy, most of which are being reprinted for the first time. They range from close personal reflections by old friends such as Sir George Douglas, J.M. Barrie, and Edmund Gosse, to fleeting glimpses by strangers who saw Hardy at a London party or at his club. Martin Ray has selected items having the greatest literary or biographical significance, and annotated them with meticulous accuracy and a keen eye for the telling detail. As a result, the volume will be an invaluable resource to scholars who are interested not only in what concerned Hardy personally and professionally, but also in how he was perceived by others. Having these items collected in one volume reveals Hardy's contemporaneous opinions about his own writings and also makes it possible to trace the marked recurrence, over time, of certain preoccupations: ancient families, Hardy's hostility to reviewers, architecture, Roman relics, Wessex folklore and dialect, animal welfare, Napoleon, and hangings. With regard to his literary career, a portrait emerges of Hardy as the scrupulous professional, properly aware of his commercial rights, while at the same time appearing, to some who met him, unconscious of his own genius.

Seth Lerer's moving memoir Prospero's Son is rooted in the age-old problem of the fraught relationship between fathers and sons. But at the same time, it is about the power of books and theater, the excitement of stories in a young man's life, and the transformative magic of words and performance. A flamboyantly performative father, a teacher and lifelong actor, comes to terms with his life as a gay man. A bookish boy becomes a professor of literature and an acclaimed expert on the very children's books that set him on his path in the first place. And when that boy grows up, he learns how hard it is to be a father and just how much books can - and cannot - instruct him. Throughout these intertwined accounts of changing selves, Lerer returns again and again to stories - the ways they teach us about discovery, deliverance, forgetting, and remembering.

Considers the reputations and biographical portrayal of three innovative and controversial writers: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and William Thackeray. These anthologies of contemporary biographical material shed light on the processes at work in the establishment of a public image and a critical reputation.

T. S. Eliot's career as a successful stage dramatist gathers pace throughout the fascinating letters of this volume. Following his early experimentation with the dark comedy Sweeney Agonistes (1932), Eliot is invited to write the words of an ambitious scenario sketched out by the producer-director E. Martin Browne (who was to direct all of Eliot's plays) for a grand pageant called The Rock (1934). The ensuing applause leads to a commission from the Bishop of Chichester to write a play for the Canterbury Festival, resulting in the quasi-liturgical masterpiece of dramatic writing, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). A huge commercial success, it remains in repertoire after eighty years. Even while absorbed in time-consuming theatre work, Eliot remains untiring in promoting the writers on Faber's ever broadening lists - George Barker, Marianne Moore and Louis MacNeice among them. In addition, Eliot works hard for the Christian Church he has espoused in recent years, serving on committees for the Church Union and the Church Literature Association, and creating at Faber & Faber a book list that embraces works on church history, theology and liturgy. Having separated from his wife Vivien in 1933, he is anxious to avoid running into her; but she refuses to comprehend that her husband has chosen to leave her and stalks him across literary society, leading to his place of work at the offices of Faber & Faber. The correspondence draws in detail upon Vivien's letters and diaries to provide a picture of her mental state and way of life - and to help the reader to appreciate her thoughts and feelings.

Oxford held a special place in Evelyn Waugh's imagination. So formative were his Oxford years that the city never left him, appearing again and again in his novels in various forms. This book explores in rich visual detail the abiding importance of Oxford as both location and experience in his literary and visual works. Drawing on specially commissioned illustrations and previously unpublished photographic material, it provides a critically robust assessment of Waugh's engagement with Oxford over the course of his literary career. Following a brief overview of Waugh's life and work, subsequent chapters look at the prose and graphic art Waugh produced as an undergraduate together with Oxford's portrayal in Brideshead Revisited and A Little Learning as well as broader conceptual concerns of religion, sexuality and idealised time. A specially commissioned, hand-drawn trail around Evelyn Waugh's Oxford guides the reader around the city Waugh knew and loved through locations such as the Botanic Garden, the Oxford Union and The Chequers. A unique literary biography, this book brings to life Waugh's Oxford, exploring the lasting impression it made on one of the most accomplished literary craftsmen of the twentieth century.

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.

A brief, evocative memoir from one of India's greatest writers. "Like a dazzling feather that has fluttered down from some unknown place. . . . How long will the feather keep its colours, waiting? The 'feather' stands for memories of childhood. Memories don't wait." In Our Sanitikentan, the late Mahasweta Devi, one of India's most celebrated writers, vividly narrates her days as a schoolgirl in the 1930s. As the aging author struggles to recapture vignettes of her childhood, these reminiscences bring to the written page not only her individual sensibility but an entire ethos. Santiniketan is home to the school and university founded by the foremost literary and cultural icon of India, Rabindranath Tagore. In these pages, a forgotten Santiniketan, seen through the innocent eyes of a young girl, comes to life-the place, its people, flora and fauna, along with its educational environment, culture of free creative expression, vision of harmonious coexistence between natural and human worlds, and the towering presence of Tagore himself. Alongside, we get a glimpse of the private Mahasweta-her inner life, family and associates, and the early experiences that shaped her personality. A nostalgic journey to a bygone era, harking back to its simple yet profound values-so distant today and so urgent yet again-Our Santiniketan is an invaluable addition to Devi's rich oeuvre available in English translation.

Rudyard Kipling has been described as 'one of the few complete originals in English literature'. In his last work, Something of Myself, he reflects on his life and the basis of his art. Yet paradoxically this ostensibly autobiographical work (as an early critic pointed out) actually discloses very little of himself. Thomas Pinney's revealing edition now uncovers the extraordinary extent to which Kipling's account of his life fails to match the biographical facts, in a series of selections, omissions and distortions. Illustrated with Kipling's own satirical drawings from the manuscripts, and brought together with his other autobiographical writings (some previously unpublished), this fascinating book sheds new light on the intriguing relationship between Kipling's life and work.

Ruskin grew up in suburban London; in later life, he settled in the Lake District . Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle moved in the opposite direction - from rural Scotland to London's Cheyne Walk. This title focuses on writers for whom 'the centre' was a pressing concern.

With an introduction by Simon Callow Judgements about the quality of works of art begin in opinion. But for the last two hundred years only the wilfully perverse (and Tolstoy) have denied the validity of the opinion that Shakespeare was a genius. Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? And what makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? Exploring Shakespeare's life, including questions of authorship and autobiography, and charting how his legacy has grown over the centuries, this extraordinary book asks how Shakespeare has come to be such a powerful symbol of genius. Written with lively passion and wit, The Genius of Shakespeare is a fascinating biography of the life - and afterlife - of our greatest poet. Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has shown how the legend of Shakespeare's genius was created and sustained, and how the man himself became a truly global phenomenon. 'The best modern book on Shakespeare' Sir Peter Hall

Michael Reynolds was the supreme biographer of Ernest Hemingway. HBO s film concentrates on Hemingway s years with his third wife, the adventurous journalist Martha Gellhorn. This book brings together Reynolds s Hemingway: The 1930s and Hemingway: The Final Years."

The three volumes that comprise this set are facsimile reproductions of contemporary biographical material. They include letters, memoirs, poems and articles on three outstanding Victorian literary partnerships. These are the Brownings, Brontes and the Rossettis.

Nude Descending a Staircase is one of the best known works of art in tihs century. It caused a sensation at the historic Armory Show of 1913, being damned by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Yet the criticism in no way perturbed it imperturable creator, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp's "readymades" (the urinal singed by R. Mutt and entitled Fountain, the snow shovel entitled In Advance of the Broken Arm, and other objects bought and exhibits as works of art) are by now familiar objecs of critical derision and delight. And Duchamp's influence has been pervasive throughout modern art, fosterin Neo-Dada, Op Art, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art. Marcel Duchamp's major work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass) was left in a state of "definitive incompletion" in 1923. The notes for this extradordinarywork form the largest part of SALT SELLER. Duchamp collected many of them for his Green Box in 1934, when their publication was immediately hailed by Andre Breton as a major intellectual event. The notes themselves will help the curious but mystified spectator of The Large Glass in no simple or straighforward way. They do, however, demonstrate wht an extraordinarily original process the making of The Bride Stripped Barde by Her Bachelors, Even was. Duchamp's wit is nowhere in greater evidence than in the section "Rrose Selavy & Co." Duchamp was photographed in women's apparel by Man Ray and created a "readymade" female alter-ego Rrose Selavy ("Eros c'est la vie" or "arroser la vie" - drink it up; celebrate life). Rrose printed a calling card and her company advertised - "For practical wear, a Rrose Selavy creation: The oblong cress, designed exclusively for ladies afflicted with hiccups." The company also had a service department which made "...home deliveries: domestic mosquitoes (half stock.)" The surrealists had proclaimed in the twenties that words were no longer playing around but had started making clove. This description seems to fit the sayings of Rrose Selavy who fashioned some of the most joyour and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern literautre.' In the section "Marcel Duchamp, Criticavit", the more serious side of Duchamp is represented by two informative interviews and two important statements on art, "The Creative Act" and "Apropos of Readymades." His more experimental writings are grouped under the title "Texticles." Taken together these varied writings constitute a major document of modern art. Whether the reader sits back and enjoys the charms of Duchamp or studies and attempts to decipher his inner-most secrets, the reader will find SALT SELLAR a compendium of delight.

A compelling portrait of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, by one of the bestselling writers of the twentieth. In this vivid biographical study, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche's habits, passions and obsessions. Concentrating on the man rather than the work, on his tragic isolation and volatile creativity, Zweig draws the reader inexorably into the drama of Nietzsche's life.

One of science fiction's undisputed grandmasters, Frederik Pohl built an astonishing career that spanned more than seven decades. Along the way he won millions of readers and seemingly as many awards while producing novels, short stories, and essays that left a profound mark on the genre. In this first-of-its-kind study, Michael R. Page traces Pohl's journey as an author but also uncovers his role as a transformative figure who shaped the genre as a literary agent, book editor, and in Gardner Dozois' words, "quite probably the best SF magazine editor who ever lived."

This first installment of the new multi-volume Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading recounts Dr. Alan Gribben's fascinating 45-year search for surviving volumes from the large library assembled by Twain and his family. That collection of more than 3,000 titles was dispersed through impromptu donations and abrupt public auctions, but over the years nearly a thousand volumes have been recovered. Gribben's research also encompasses many hundreds of other books, stories, essays, poems, songs, plays, operas, newspapers, and magazines with which Mark Twain was demonstrably familiar. Gribben published the original edition of Mark Twain's Library in 1980. Hailed by the eminent Twain scholar Louis J. Budd as "a superb job that will last for generations," the work nevertheless soon went out of print and for three decades has been a hard-to-find item on the rare book market. Meanwhile, over a distinguished career of writing, teaching, and research on Twain, Gribben continued to annotate, revise, and expand the content such that it has become his life's masterwork. Thoroughly revised, enlarged, and retitled, Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading now reappears, to greatly expand our comprehension of the incomparable author's reading tastes and influences. Volume I traces Twain's extensive use of public libraries. It identifies Twain's favorite works, but also reveals his strong dislikes-Chapter 10 is devoted to his "Library of Literary Hogwash," specimens of atrocious poetry and prose that he delighted in ridiculing. In describing Twain's habit of annotating his library books, Gribben reveals his methods of detecting forged autographs and marginal notes that have fooled booksellers, collectors, and libraries. The volume's 25 chapters trace from various perspectives the patterns of Twain's voracious reading and relate what he read to his own literary outpouring. A "Critical Bibliography" evaluates the numerous scholarly books and articles that have studied Twain's reading, and an index guides readers to the volume's diverse subjects. Twain enjoyed cultivating a public image as a largely unread natural talent; on occasion he even denied being acquainted with titles that he had owned, inscribed, and annotated in his own personal library. He convinced many friends and interviewers that he had no appetite for fiction, poetry, drama, or belles-lettres, yet Gribben reveals volumes of evidence to the contrary. He examines this unlettered pose that Twain affected and speculates about the reasons behind it. In reality, whether Twain was memorizing the classic writings of ancient Rome or the more contemporary works of Milton, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Tennyson-or, for that matter, quoting from the best-selling fiction and poetry of his day-he exhibited a lifelong hunger to overcome the brevity of his formal education. Several of Gribben's chapters explore the connections between Twain's knowledge of authors such as Malory, Shakespeare, Poe, and Browning, and his own literary works, group readings, and family activities. Volumes II and III of Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading will be released in 2019 and will deliver an "Annotated Catalog" arranged from A to Z, documenting in detail the staggering scope of Twain's reading. - book is one-of-a-kind, a monumental project, representing 45 years of research - scholarship of the book is impeccable, by writer internationally known in the Twain community - publisher has a much-publicized association with Alan Gribben; in 2011 we released the highly controversial NewSouth Edition of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, edited by Dr. Gribben - Twain is among our more popular 19th-century American writers, and works about him are often of literary interest

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come' Sunday Times 'Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity ... A moving, fascinating biography' The Times Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain's most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes's lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own.

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine Comedy For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography, which offers a fresh account of the medieval Florentine poet's life and thought before and after his exile in 1302. Beginning with the often violent circumstances of Dante's life, the book examines his successive works as testimony to the course of his passionate humanity: his lyric poetry through to the Vita nova as the great work of his first period; the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia and the poems of his early years in exile; and the Monarchia and the Commedia as the product of his maturity. Describing as it does a journey of the mind, the book confirms the nature of Dante's undertaking as an exploration of what he himself speaks of as "maturity in the flame of love." The result is an original synthesis of Dante's life and work.