The story of Richard Aldington, outstanding Imagist poet and author of the bestselling war novel Death of a Hero (1929), takes place against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent and creative years of the twentieth century. Vivien Whelpton provides a remarkably detailed and sensitive portrayal of the writer from the age of thirty-eight to his death from a heart attack in 1962. The first volume, Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover, described Aldington's life as a stalwart of the pre-war London literary scene, his experience as an infantryman on the Western Front and his postwar personal and creative crises; this second volume seeks to balance the stories of Aldington's subsequent public and private lives through a careful reading of his novels, poems and letters with his circle of acquaintances. The ways in which Aldington's dysfunctional childhood and survivor's guilt continued to haunt him through the inter-war years and beyond are masterfully untangled by an author with gifted psychological insight into her subject. Volume Two covers Aldington's personal and public lives as he transformed himself from poet to novelist and from novelist to biographer and explores his debacles and triumphs, particularly in the wake of his hugely controversial attack on the reputation of T.E. Lawrence. This authoritative biography recounts the life of one of the most underrated writers of the last century.

"Ghost of the Hardy Boys is an elegant book, full of charm and pathos and whimsy. The writing is restrained, the characterizations deep and rich, the humor nuanced." -Washington Post As millions of boys and girls devoured the early adventures of the Hardy Boys, little did the young readers and aspiring sleuths know: the series' author was not Franklin W. Dixon, as the cover trumpeted. It was Leslie McFarlane, a nearly penniless scribbler, who hammered out the first adventures while living in a remote cabin without electricity or running water in Northern Ontario. McFarlane was among the first bestselling ghostwriters and this, at last, is his story-as much fun as the stories he wrote. In 1926, 23-year-old cub newspaper reporter Leslie McFarlane responded to an ad: "Experienced Fiction Writer Wanted to Work from Publisher's Outlines." The ad was signed by Edward Stratemeyer, whose syndicate effectively invented mass-market children's book publishing in America. McFarlane, who had a few published adventure stories to his name, was hired and his first job was to write Dave Fearless Under the Ocean as Roy Rockwood-for a flat fee of $100, no royalties. His pay increased to $125 when Stratemeyer proposed a new series of detective stories for kids involving two high school aged brothers who would solve mysteries. The title of the series was The Hardy Boys. McFarlane's pseudonym would be Franklin W. Dixon. McFarlane went on to write twenty-one Hardy Boys adventures. From The Tower Treasure in 1927 to The Phantom Freighter in 1947, into full-fledged classics filled with perilous scrapes, loyal chums, and breakneck races to solve the mystery. McFarlane kept his ghostwriting gig secret until late in life when his son urged him to share the story of being the real Franklin W. Dixon. By the time McFarlane died in 1977, unofficial sales estimates of The Hardy Boys series already topped 50 million copies. Ghost of the Hardy Boys is a fascinating, funny, and always charming look back at a vanished era of journalism, writing, and book publishing. It is for anyone who loves a great story and who's curious about solving the mystery of the fascinating man behind one of the most widely read and enduring children's book series in history.

The Small Years was first published in June 1930 and printed three times in its first six months. In 1937 it was re-issued in a smaller pocket edition, and this went out of print during the war. This second edition, which was originally published in 1950, returned the text to its larger form. This is simply one man's account of what it meant to him to be a child - to be born and brought up at an unusual school in a remote and beautiful rurality; an account which, by all the evidence, clearly has power over its readers of inciting them to recover and live over again their own private memories of a great variety of childhoods. Mr Walter de la Mare's introduction to the first edition is retained, and the author's original map of the village is in its place once more.

This second volume of the acclaimed Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence covers the years 1912-22, the period in which he forged his reputation as one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. The story opens as the twenty-six-year-old Lawrence travels to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the wife of a university professor and mother of three small children. In his baggage on that prosaic cross-channel ferry was a draft of Sons and Lovers, the first of a group of novels with which Lawrence was to revolutionize English fiction over the next decade. This meticulously researched volume opens a new perspective on the central period of Lawrence's life and literary career. Drawing on memoirs, oral recollections, and unpublished manuscript material, it deals squarely with the vexing issue of Lawrence and Frieda's personal relations--issues that have more often been gossiped about than scrupulously examined. Above all it reveals the triumph of Lawrence's art during a decade of extraordinary trials in which, against all reasonable odds, the coal-miner's son established himself as the most innovative and notorious novelist of his generation.

When Yates McDaniel died in Florida in 1983, few outside his family paid much attention. The only hint of his fame came in a brief obituary buried on the inside pages of the New York Times. The obit suggested bravery and a past far more exciting than almost anyone knew. Even those who worked alongside him in the 1960s at the Associated Press were startled to learn what McDaniel had been, what he had done when he was a young man and the world was at war. Yet, this remarkable reporter covered more of the Asian war than anyone else -- from the savage Japanese assault on Nanking in 1937 to the fall of Singapore in 1942 to landing with US Marines on New Britain in 1943. He took risks no other reporter ever accepted, and colleagues joked that Japanese-bombers followed him wherever he went.

John Forster (1812-76), an exact contemporary of Charles Dickens, was one of his closest friends, and acted for him (as for many other authors) as advisor, editor, proofreader, agent and marketing manager: according to Thackeray, 'whenever anyone is in a scrape we all fly to him for refuge. He is omniscient and works miracles.' Forster was Dickens' literary executor, and was left the manuscripts of many of the novels, which he in turn left (along with the rest of his magnificent library) to the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum). He was ideally placed to write a biography of Dickens, having known him since the 1830s, and having been involved in deeply private matters such as Dickens' separation from his wife. This three-volume account was first published between 1872 and 1874; the version of Volume 1 reissued here is the 'seventh edition' of 1872.

John Forster (1812-76), an exact contemporary of Charles Dickens, was one of his closest friends, and acted for him (as for many other authors) as advisor, editor, proofreader, agent and marketing manager: according to Thackeray, 'whenever anyone is in a scrape we all fly to him for refuge. He is omniscient and works miracles.' Forster was Dickens' literary executor, and was left the manuscripts of many of the novels, which he in turn left (along with the rest of his magnificent library) to the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum). He was ideally placed to write a biography of Dickens, having known him since the 1830s, and having been involved in deeply private matters such as Dickens' separation from his wife. This three-volume account was first published between 1872 and 1874; the version of Volume 2 reissued here is the 'tenth thousand' of 1873.

Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. In this radical new biography, we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion to look afresh at Blake's life and work - and, crucially, his mind. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context and shows us how Blake can help us better understand ourselves.

A groundbreaking biography of Milton's formative years that provides a new account of the poet's political radicalization John Milton (1608-1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton's literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost-but would first justify the killing of a king. Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton's formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton's development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton's best-known works from this period, including the "Nativity Ode," "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," Comus, and "Lycidas." Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton's astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.

In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses and humble realisations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Weaving together the voices that shaped her, Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, the teachings of a changing earth and the poets who paved her way. She explores her grief at the loss of her mother and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife and community member. Moving fluidly among prose, song and poetry, Poet Warrior is a luminous journey of becoming that sings with all the jazz, blues, tenderness and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.

"The Well of Loneliness" is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex scenes, yet in 1928, the year in which the novel was published, it was deemed obscene in a British court of law for its defense of sexual inversion and was forbidden for sale or import into England. Its author, Radclyffe Hall, was already well-known as a writer and West End celebrity, but the fame and notoriety of that one book has all but eclipsed a literary output of some half-dozen other novels and several volumes of poetry.In "Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing" Richard Dellamora offers the first full look at the entire range of Hall's published and unpublished works of fiction, poetry, and autobiography and reads through them to demonstrate how she continually played with the details of her own life to help fashion her own identity as well as to bring into existence a public lesbian culture. Along the way, Dellamora revises many of the truisms about Hall that had their origins in the memoirs of her long-term partner, Una Troubridge, and that have found an afterlife in the writings of Hall's biographers.In detailing Hall's explorations of the self, Dellamora is the first seriously to consider their contexts in Freudian psychoanalysis as understood in England in the 1920s. As important, he uncovers Hall's involvement with other modes of speculative psychology, including Spiritualism, Theosophy, and an eclectic brand of Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Dellamora's Hall is a woman of complex accommodations, able to reconcile her marriage to Troubridge with her passionate affairs with other women, and her experimental approach to gender and sexuality with her conservative politics and Catholicism. She is, above all, a thinker continually inventive about the connections between selfhood and desire, a figure who has much to contribute to our own efforts to understand transgendered and transsexual existence today.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was one of the most influential authors of the nineteenth century. His satirical essays and perceptive historical biographies caused him to be regarded for much of the Victorian period as a literary genius and eminent social philosopher. These volumes, first published in 1882, form the first part of Carlyle's official biography, describing his early life and literary work in Scotland. Carlyle's early career was spent as a teacher and part-time writer before his move to London in 1834. Written by Carlyle's close friend James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), this candid and controversial biography describes in vivid detail Carlyle's early literary influences and the sense of isolation he felt during his frustrating years as a schoolmaster. This revealing work broke traditional Victorian biographical conventions, and is considered a classic for its critical analysis of Carlyle's actions and character. Volume 1 covers the years 1795-1827.

'n Biografie van die bekroonde skrywer Jeanne Goosen, met foto's, briewe en bydraes van vriende wat vertel hoe hulle dié ikoniese figuur ken. Die skrywer, Petrovna Metelerkamp, is die 2019-wenner van die ATKV-Veertjie vir nie-fiksie vir Ingrid Jonker - 'n Biografie. Die boek bevat materiaal wat voorheen ontoeganklik was en beloof om ure se leesgenot te verskaf aan die duisende aanhangers van die digter-dramaturg en skrywer van Ons is nie almal so nie.

'A brave, beautiful book that could double as a handbook to accompany anyone on their journey through cancer' Jackie Kay, New Statesman The Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and invigorating account of the experience of breast cancer, from biopsy to mastectomy, told by the great feminist and activist Audre Lorde. Moving between journal entry, memoir, and essay, Lorde fuses the personal and political to reflect on the many questions breast cancer raises: questions of survival, sexuality, prosthesis and self-care. It is a journey of survival, friendship, and self-acceptance. 'Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet' Adrienne Rich 'This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me' Alice Walker

Life and Letters of Toru Dutt (1921) is a biography of Toru Dutt. Comprising biographical sections by scholar Harihar Das, selections from her many letters, and commentary on her novels and translations, Life and Letters of Toru Dutt is an invaluable resource for information on a pioneering figure in Indian history and Bengali literature. Born in Calcutta to a family of Bengali Christians, Toru Dutt was raised at the crossroads of English and Indian cultures. In addition to her native Bengali, she became fluent in English, French, and Sanskrit as a young girl, eventually writing novels and poems in each language. Harihar Das' biography is an exhaustive record of her life from youth to young adulthood, granting particular attention to her travels in England and Europe, which Dutt herself describes in beautiful prose in letters to friends and family. Despite her limited body of work, Dutt's legacy as a groundbreaking writer remains firm in India and around the world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Harihar Das and Toru Dutt's Life and Letters of Toru Dutt is a classic work of Bengali literature reimagined for modern readers.

A Political Biography of Sarah Fielding provides the most complete discussion of Fielding's works and career currently available. Tracing the development of Fielding's artistic and instructive agendas from her earliest publications forward, Johnson presents a compelling portrait of a deeply read author who sought to claim a place within literary culture for women's experiences. As a practical didacticist, Fielding sought to teach her readers to live happier, more fulfilling lives by appropriating and at times resisting the texts that defined their culture. While Fielding often retreats from the overtly political concerns that captured the attention of her contemporaries, her works are daring forays into the public sphere that both challenge and reinforce the foundations of British society. Giving voice to those who have been marginalized, Fielding's creative productions are at once conservative and radical, revealing her ambiguous appreciation for tradition, her fears of modernity, and her abiding commitment to women who must live within forever imperfect worlds.

The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinka now follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland.
In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified his plays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit of Nigeria itself by bringing to life the friends and family who bolstered and inspired him, and by describing the pioneering theater works that defied censure and tradition. Soyinka not only recounts his exile and the terrible reign of General Sani Abacha, but shares vivid memories and playful anecdotes-including his improbable friendship with a prominent Nigerian businessman and the time he smuggled a frozen wildcat into America so that his students could experience a proper Nigerian barbecue.
More than a major figure in the world of literature, Wole Soyinka is a courageous voice for human rights, democracy, and freedom. You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an intimate chronicle of his thrilling public life, a meditation on justice and tyranny, and a mesmerizing testament to a ravaged yet hopeful land.

"From the Hardcover edition."

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

Best known for his brief marriage to George Eliot, John Walter Cross (1840-1924) compiled this three-volume 'autobiography' of 1885 from his late wife's journals and letters. Eliot was never married to her long-term partner G. H. Lewes, and she courted further scandal when she married Cross, twenty years her junior, in the spring of 1880. While these volumes offer a valuable insight into Eliot's private reflections, what is perhaps most telling is the material left out or rewritten in Cross' efforts to lend his wife's unconventional life some respectability, which he does at the expense of what one reviewer described as Eliot's 'salt and spice'. George Eliot's Life will be of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century biography and literature. Volume 3 focuses on Eliot's final years, including her later literary success, travels in Spain, the death of G. H. Lewes, and her marriage to Cross.

Best known for his brief marriage to George Eliot, John Cross (1840 1924) compiled this three-volume 'autobiography' of 1885 from his late wife's journals and letters. Eliot was never married to her long-term partner G. H. Lewes, and she courted further scandal when she married Cross, twenty years her junior, in 1880. While these volumes offer a valuable insight into Eliot's private reflections, what is perhaps most telling is the material left out or rewritten in Cross' efforts to lend his wife's unconventional life some respectability, which he does at the expense of what one reviewer described as Eliot's 'salt and spice'. George Eliot's Life will be of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century biography and literature. Volume 1 covers Eliot's life from 1819 to 1857, beginning with a brief sketch of her childhood and continuing with her move to Coventry, then to London, and travels to Geneva.

First published in 1836, this lively two-volume autobiography of Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) reveals the background and mindset of this fascinating character. Best-known for helping to stimulate interest in bibliography and for his enthusiasm in promoting book collecting among the aristocracy, the English bibliographer adopts a conversational and anecdotal tone as he shares the details of his life and work with the reader. Volume 2 begins with Dibdin's experiences at Althorp, describing how the rich library there was thrown open to him. He then continues his detailed discussion of his publications, and focuses on his life in London, before the final chapter turns to private libraries and their importance in his life. Drawing upon letters and literature throughout, Dibdin recounts many entertaining tales, including an unfortunate encounter with a 'savage-hearted critic' at a dinner party, and introduces the influential characters he meets along the way.

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.

In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming 'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar, combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields. Volume 1 covers the period to 1860, the year in which the final volume of Modern Painters was published.