Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Literary Figures

John Oliver Killens's politically charged novels "And Then We Heard the Thunder" and "The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd," were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of which is his novel "Youngblood," have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher, he was the founding chair of the Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement....

Conversations with Michael Crichton brings together decades of interviews and profiles with one of the world's most successful authors. Michael Crichton (1942-2008) had many careers-doctor, novelist, film director, screenwriter-but was best known to millions of readers as -Father of the techno-thriller.- His novels have sold more than 150 million copies, have been translated into thirty-six languages, and have been made into thirteen films. He remains the only writer to have had simultaneously the number-one book, the number-one movie, and the number-one television show.

While...

Conversations with Michael Crichton brings together decades of interviews and profiles with one of the world's most successful authors. Michael Crichton (1942-2008) had many careers-doctor, novelist, film director, screenwriter-but was best known to millions of readers as -Father of the techno-thriller.- His novels have sold more than 150 million copies, have been translated into thirty-six languages, and have been made into thirteen films. He remains the only writer to have had simultaneously the number-one book, the number-one movie, and the number-one television show.

While...

Pulitzer Prize--winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman, perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the twentieth century, helped shape and sustain a collective identity for white southerners. A journalist, lecturer, radio broadcaster, and teacher of renown, Freeman wrote and spoke on themes related to southern memory throughout his life.

Keith D. Dickson's Sustaining Southern Identity offers a masterful intellectual biography of Freeman as well as a comprehensive analysis of how twentieth-century southerners came to remember the Civil War, fashion their values and...

Catherine Hogarth, who came from a cultured Scots family, married Charles Dickens in 1836, the same year he began serializing his first novel. Together they traveled widely, entertained frequently, and raised ten children. In 1858, the celebrated writer pressured Catherine to leave their home, unjustly alleging that she was mentally disordered unfit and unloved as wife and mother. Constructing a plotline nearly as powerful as his stories of Scrooge and Little Nell, Dickens created the image of his wife as a depressed and uninteresting figure, using two of her three sisters against her, by...

An improbably funny account of how the purchase and restoration of a disaster of a fixer-upper saves a young marriage

When a season of ludicrous loss tests the mettle of their marriage, Matthew Batt and his wife decide not to call it quits. They set their sights instead on the purchase of a dilapidated house in the Sugarhouse section of Salt Lake City. With no homesteading experience and a full-blown quarter-life crisis on their hands, these perpetual grad students/waiters/nonprofiteers decide to seek salvation through renovation, and do all they can to turn a former crack house into a...

Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow's Story is the universally acclaimed author's poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger's Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow's...

In this unique and lyrical book, Deresiewicz weaves the misadventures of Austen's characters with his own youthful follies, demonstrating the power of the great novelist's teachings--and how, for Austen, growing up and making mistakes are one and the same. Honest, erudite, and deeply moving, A Jane Austen Education is the story of one man's discovery of the...

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil's foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado's writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. G....