Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with "bad blood" that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also one of the most radical and controversial. The story of Spinoza's life takes the reader into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual, and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. This new edition of Steven Nadler's biography, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award for biography and translated into a dozen languages, is enhanced by exciting new archival discoveries about his family background, his youth, and the various philosophical, political, and religious contexts of his life and works. There is more detail about his family's business and communal activities, about his relationships with friends and correspondents, and about the development of his writings, which were so scandalous to his contemporaries.

In 1907, author, poet, essayist, and folk art historian Eliza Calvert Hall (1856--1935) published Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a collection of stories about rural life infused with the spirit and gentle good humor of its elderly narrator, Aunt Jane. The book and several sequels achieved wide popularity, reaching an estimated one million readers in her lifetime, and placed Hall in the front ranks of "local color" fiction writers of her time. Eliza Calvert Hall's life and work unfolded during a time of restlessness and change for American women. Born Eliza "Lida" Calvert in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Hall experienced the upheaval of both the Civil War and family scandal. Forced to help support her mother and four siblings by teaching school, she became a published poet, adopting her grandmother's name, Hall, as her pseudonym. At twenty-nine, she married William A. Obenchain, and in the space of eight years gave birth to four children. As Hall struggled to balance her writing career with the duties of a nineteenth-century wife and mother, suffragist Laura Clay was lobbying for every woman's right to vote. Hall joined the battle, writing fearlessly in support of suffrage and equality. While her passionate essays served as a direct appeal for this cause, her creative writing also carried a feminist spirit, celebrating the strength, humor, love, and art of the common woman. In Eliza Calvert Hal: Kentucky Author and Suffragistl, Lynn E. Niedermeier tells the story of this remarkable Kentuckian for the first time. Hall's challenge was to balance the artist's creative ambitions with the crusader's passion for achieving the goal of political equality for American women. Her successes did not stem from privilege or leisure; although she was an acclaimed writer, Hall was an ordinary woman, a wife and mother of moderate economic means. Through the power of her words, she challenged others to match her courage, independence, intellectual energy, and loyalty to her sex.

"I was one of the 8,000-strong 'Betjemaniacs' gathered at Carruan farm in Cornwall in August 2006 to celebrate the hundredth birthday of Sir John Betjeman, the late Poet Laureate. Situated high above Polzeath, with tremendous views out to the azure Atlantic and the great headland of Pentire, Carruan was, with its exhilarating sense of space, an inspirational choice for this great event. I stood in the pasty-queue with the Archbishop of Canterbury, watched the poetic performance of Bert Biscoe, and browsed among the bookstalls in the hope of finding second-hand copies of rare Betjeman books to add to my collection. Here was that Patrick Taylor-Martin volume that had eluded me for years, and Betjeman's Britain - compiled by Candida Lycett Green, Betjeman's daughter - together with more recent editions of old favourites." Philip Payton, in the preface to John Betjeman and Cornwall Quintessentially English, Betjeman was an 'outsider' in England - and doubly so in Cornwall where, as he was the first to admit, he was a 'foreigner'. And yet, as this book describes, Betjeman also strove to acquire a veneer of 'Cornishness', cultivating an alternative Celtic identity, and finding inspiration in Cornwall's Anglo-Catholic tradition. He was also active in Cornish affairs, insisting that Cornwall was not part of England, and championing Cornish environmental concerns that anticipated today's focus on sustainability. The new research in this book includes a wealth of previously ignored source material, forming a lively new account of Betjeman's life and work and his defining relationship with Cornwall. This book is likely to be controversial and to provoke debate.

'I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual. I make no apology for that, nor am I nervous that it will it make a jot of difference. I shall still be thought to be kindly, cosy and essentially harmless. I am in the pigeon-hole marked 'no threat' and did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear.' Alan Bennett's third collection of prose Keeping On Keeping On follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories, each published ten years apart. This latest collection contains Bennett's peerless diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre (The Habit of Art, People, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks), a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. There's a provocative sermon on private education given before the University at King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and 'Baffled at a Bookcase' offers a passionate defence of the public library. The book includes Denmark Hill, a darkly comic radio play set in suburban south London, as well as Bennett's reflections on a quarter of a century's collaboration with Nicholas Hytner. This is an engaging, humane, sharp, funny and unforgettable record of life according to the inimitable Alan Bennett.

A.E. Housman's poetry (especially A Shropshire Lad) remains well-known, widely read and often quoted. However, Housman did not view himself as a professional poet, always making quite clear that his proper job' was as a Professor of Latin. Housman's fame as a poet has often obscured the fact that he was the leading British classical scholar of his generation, and a Cambridge Professor. It has also sometimes been suggested that Housman's two areas of activity are the sign of a flawed or divided' personality. A.E. Housman: A Single Life argues that there is no fundamental tension between Housman the poet and Housman the scholar, and his career is presented very much as that of a working academic who also wrote poetry. The book gives a full account of what Housman described as the great and real troubles of my early manhood', and in particular his unrequited and life-long love for his undergraduate friend Moses Jackson. It resists the temptation to classify Housman too exclusively as a melancholic, and is sceptical about Housman's reputed rudeness and misanthropy, pointing out that, though Housman was famously aloof in manner, he was notably loyal and generous, courteous in his daily dealings and generally liked by those who knew him. He also possessed a highly developed sense of the absurd and a ready and often disconcerting wit, features which characterised not only his letters and miscellaneous writings, but also, famously, much of his scholarly work.

Picking up her story in the late '60s at age 21, Cathy Gildiner whisks the reader through five years and three countries, beginning when she is a poetry student at Oxford. Her education extended beyond the classroom to London's swinging Carnaby Street, the mountains of Wales, and a posh country estate.
After Oxford, Cathy returns to Cleveland, Ohio, which was still reeling from the Hough Ghetto Riots. Not one to shy away from a challenge, she teaches at a high school where police escort teachers through the parking lot, trying to engage apathetic students and tussling with the education authorities.
In 1970, Cathy moves to Canada. While studying literature at the University of Toronto, she rooms with members of the FLQ (Quebec separatists) and then with one of the biggest drug dealers in Canada. Along the way, she falls in love with the man who eventually became her husband and embarks on a new career in psychology.
Coming Ashore brings readers back to a fascinating era populated by lively characters, but most memorable of all is the singular Cathy McClure.

Written between August and December 1938, Autumn Journal is still considered one of the most valuable and moving testaments of living through the thirties by a young writer. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.

In this frank and witty memoir, Ken Ilgunas lays bare the existential terror of graduating from the University of Buffalo with $32,000 of student debt. Ilgunas set himself an ambitious mission: get out of debt as quickly as possible. Inspired by the frugality and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, Ilgunas undertook a three-year transcontinental journey, working in Alaska as a tour guide, garbage picker, and night cook to pay off his student loans before hitchhiking home to New York. Debt-free, Ilgunas then enrolled in a master's program at Duke University, determined not to borrow against his future again. He used the last of his savings to buy himself a used Econoline van and outfitted it as his new dorm. The van, stationed in a campus parking lot, would be more than an adventure-it would be his very own "Walden on Wheels." Freezing winters, near-discovery by campus police, and the constant challenge of living in a confined space would test Ilgunas's limits and resolve in the two years that followed. What had begun as a simple mission would become an enlightening and life-changing social experiment. Walden on Wheels offers a spirited and pointed perspective on the dilemma faced by those who seek an education but who also want to, as Thoreau wrote, "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."

In Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries addressing chronology and contexts, ending with encompassing afterword, this collection provides a selection of essays and reviews that reflect their times and tell the story of Munro's emergence and recognition as an internationally acclaimed writer since the 1970s. Acknowledging her beginnings and her persistence as a writer of increasingly exceptional short stories, and just short stories, it treats her career through Thacker's criticism up to her fourteenth collection, Dear Life (2012), and to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Altogether, this book encompasses the whole trajectory of Munro's critical presence while offering a singularly informed retrospective perspective.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many and wide as are the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and doubtful as many important passages of it remain - in vexatious contrast with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data - we have at least become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account of it can be built. These foundations consist partly of a meagre though gradually increasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in public documents, - in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and suchlike records - partly of the conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal evidence of the poet's own indisputably genuine works, together with a few references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or immediate successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as genuine, necessarily forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as cannot with any degree of safety be conducted except on principles far from infallible with regard to all the instances to which they have been applied, but now accepted by the large majority of competent scholars. Thus, by a process which is in truth dulness and dryness itself except to patient endeavour stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited number of results has been safely established, and others have at all events been placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around a third series of conclusions or conjectures the tempest of contro-versy still rages; and even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations through a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, or commended to sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction.

'Like all good diarists Paling's musings are funny, tender and uncensored' Sunday Times 6 April 2007 Writing income for the year so far: minus GBP300 'I feel that this might just be the year in which something happens. Then again it might not. But hope drives all writers on.' It's unlikely that you'll know Chris Paling's face or have heard his name. This is his diary of trying to make a living as a writer, through the typical career trajectory of what is deemed a 'mid-list novelist'. Publishing rule 6: there is no such thing as a 'low-list' novelist. In renumeration terms, writing is a career that often ends in disappointment and despair, and occasionally disgrace. Paling artfully explores what compels him and so many others to write - the battling joys and agonies of when that compulsion beds itself in one's psyche, and a day without writing is a day wasted. A fascinating insight into the writing process, he tracks the need to write something new, or something old in a new way, something relevant, something that needs to be written when very little actually does, in search of that ever-elusive goal of being 'in print'. By turns moving, wry and brutally honest, A Very Nice Rejection Letter unveils the rewarding yet soul-baring life of a novelist. At its heart is a love letter to the art of writing but this delightful book is also a profound reflection on the forces that drive us all.

In the foreword to Li-Young Lee's first book, "Rose" (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, "What characterizes Li-Young Lee's poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit." Poetry lovers agree "Rose" has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country's most beloved poets.

"Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee" is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family's flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.

This memoir, a young poet's tragicomic account of crossed loves and rebellions as he grows from boy to man under the vigilant eyes of the state in the Soviet Union between the 1950s and 1970s, can be approached as a bildungsroman. It is set in Tallinn, Riga and Moscow (with episodes in Uzbekistan, Moldavia, and the Ukraine) and, apart from this author's own story, deals with the experiences of young people of that period, their friendships and attempts to form erotic/romantic attachments, as well as their search for national-Baltic, Jewish, Russian-identity while being watched and sometimes interrogated by the secret police. It also includes some reconstruction of the author's family history: expulsion from Spain, the Magician of Prague, the renowned historian Simon Dubnov. The volume progresses from the demonstration of two seven-year-old boys' against Stalin and Lenin, in Tallinn, in the mid-1950s to a dramatic and doomed love affair with a woman married to an army colonel who attempts to shoot the author as the latter is about to make his final exit from the country, with the KGB on his tail, in the early 1970s. While raising a number of important historical and contemporary issues, the memoir is also an involving narrative, a visually descriptive story, varied and engrossing, involving philosophical, theological, and detective elements; popular and literary culture; countries and languages; high seriousness and undercutting irony.

Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. From Hemingway's Key West to Williams's New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

Johnson rose from obscure origins to become a major literary figure of the eighteenth century. Through a detailed survey of his major works and political journalism, Hudson constructs a complex picture of Johnson as a moralist forced to accept the realistic nature of politics during an era of revolutionary transition.

Furbank and Owens attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe's political career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are here inextricably intertwined.

Most famous as the author of "Gulliver's Travels", Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was one of the most important propagandists and satirists of his day. This study seeks to contextualize Swift within the political arena of his day.

In the autumn of 1873, Wilkie Collins followed the example of fellow literary celebrities Dickens and Thackeray, and began a six-month reading tour of America. This book places this tour within the American lyceum movement of the later nineteenth century.

John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

This is the first study to assess the entire career of Alexander Pope (16881744) in relation to the political issues of his time.