John Leonard was a lion of American letters. A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature. Reading for My Life is a monumental collection of Leonard's most significant writings spanning five decades from his earliest columns for the Harvard Crimson to his final essays for the New York Review of Books. Definitive reviews of Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth, among others, display Leonard's encyclopedic knowledge of literature and make this book a landmark...

Faithful Labourers surveys and evaluates existing criticism of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, tracing the major debates as they have unfolded over the past three centuries. Eleven chapters split over two volumes consider the key debates in Milton criticism, including discussion of Milton's style, his use of the epic genre, and his references to Satan, God, innocence, the fall, sex, nakedness, and astronomy.
Volume one attends to questions of style and genre. The first three chapters examine the longstanding debate about Milton's grand style and the question of whether it forfeits the...

Milton's magnificent poem narrating Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, now in a beautiful new clothbound edition

In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties--blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, and briefly in danger of execution--Paradise Lost's...

Leading critic John Leonard explores the writings of John Milton from his early poetry to his major prose.

Faithful Labourers surveys and evaluates existing criticism of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, tracing the major debates as they have unfolded over the past three centuries. Eleven chapters split over two volumes consider the key debates in Milton criticism, including discussion of Milton's style, his use of the epic genre, and his references to Satan, God, innocence, the fall, sex, nakedness, and astronomy.
Volume one attends to questions of style and genre. The first three chapters examine the longstanding debate about Milton's grand style and the question of whether...