Philip Callow's new biography of Russia's greatest dramatist and storyteller is a major achievement. By examining Chekhov's life within the context of the evolution of his art, Mr. Callow makes the reader acutely aware of the hidden ground from which Chekhov's work sprang and on which his divided life stood. Arthur Miller calls Chekhov "in nearly every way our contemporary." His irony is as modern as Beckett's; as a letter writer he is as natural and irresistible as D. H. Lawrence. In his personal life he is as understated as in his work. But the love theme that is central to his biography and his art is profoundly convincing and humane, but in his own life he holds back coldly and perhaps fearfully from real commitment. He constantly surprises us: a modest genius who finds the whole nature of fame unseemly; a man furious at injustice who is apolitical; a humorist in despair before the mediocrity, stupidity, and cruelty of the world; a generous spirit unable to stop working to improve the lot of others, incapable of turning anyone away, who remains stubbornly apart and hidden. Readers of Mr. Callow's Chekhov will find it a supremely satisfying biography, beautifully told.

Published on the hundredth anniversary of Van Gogh s death, this is the first full-length biography of this undying man in twenty years and surely the most comprehensive account to date. Mr. Callow treats more searchingly than any previous work the development of Van Gogh s genius and his emergence as an artist after early struggles to find a vocation, first in the world of art dealing and later as an evangelical missionary among Belgian miners. Using the skills and psychological insights of an accomplished novelist, and drawing upon new Van Gogh materials which have surfaced in the last two decades, Mr. Callow sets a turbulent life story firmly in historical context, including Vincent s desperate attempts to accept his repressive religious upbringing, and his unhappy experiences in love. The story is filled with paradoxes and crushing failures, ending in suicide that was to lead to enormous posthumous success. Through Mr. Callow s book we can see Van Gogh s life and work in terms of tumult, of a legend breaking out of the triumph and confusion of 19th-century culture while representing it uniquely. It is perhaps the story of a saint, certainly a hero of art.

Lawrence's growth to maturity was a painful and traumatic business, the impulses of the young lover constantly thwarted by the self-doubt of the mother's son. Philip Callow captures the extraordinary drama of Lawrence's life from 1885, the year of his birth, to 1919 when he quit England. In rich and intimate detail, Mr. Callow recreates the half-rural, half-industrial world of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up and which haunted his imagination all his life; he traces Lawrence's relationships with women, particularly his dominating mother, his first love Jessie Chambers, and earthy Frieda, his partner in a stormy marriage. And he shows how Lawrence was able to transmute the contradictions of his personality into the stuff of art. "A surprising tale of metamorphosis which Mr. Callow re-creates better than any previous Lawrence biographer."-Julian Moynihan. "A happy balance of insight and sympathy.... His achievement is to let us see [Lawrence's] impulses and passions from the inside."-Margaret Drabble.