Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Literary Figures

George Palmer Putnam (1814-1872) was arguably the most important American publisher of the nineteenth century, a man fully and multiply involved in developments transforming all aspects of literary culture. In this comprehensive cultural biography, Ezra Greenspan offers a wide-ranging account of a rich, productive life lived in print, interrelating Putnam's life with the life of his family (one of the most remarkable of its time), with the changing patterns of life in New York City and the nation, and with the institutionalization of modern print culture in nineteenth-century America....

The Rise of Sinclair Lewis examines the making of Lewis's best-selling novels Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry--their sources, composition, publication, and subsequent critical reception. Drawing on thousands of pages of material from Lewis's notes, outlines, and drafts--most of it never before published--James M. Hutchisson shows how Lewis selected usable materials and shaped them, through his unique vision, into novels that reached and remained part of the American literary imagination. Hutchisson also describes for the first...

"When I found these cigarettes you had left I thought at first to keep them as a remembrance. But I am far from needing a remembrance." --From Max Perkins's first letter to Elizabeth Lemmon, dated 14 April 1922

Maxwell E. Perkins, famed editor of such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe, was a man whose personal and professional lives often intersected. Nowhere is this more evident than in his correspondence with Elizabeth Lemmon, the Virginia socialite who became his long-distance confidante....

North Callahan has written the complete and definitive biography of a unique writer and rare personality. Carl Sandburg was a many-faceted man: poet, musician, biographer, historian, writer of children's books, and novelist. Callahan knew Sandburg personally and worked with him in various historical enterprises. He has done extensive research on letters, diaries, scholarly papers, and other documents in various libraries and archives around the country, including material in the Sandburg homes and especially in the Carl Sandburg Collection at the University of IIlinois.

Callahan has...

Giving us a new sense of Dickinson's ways of being in her world, this book traces the perceptions of that world in the poetry and contributes to our pleasure in the performance of a virtuoso. Elizabeth Philips shows the imaginative uses the poet made of her own life but also the verifiable use of her responses to others--personal friends and relatives, historical and literary figures, and "nature's people"--in the play of language that registered her insights. The book is not a biography; it considers, instead, evidence of the poet's character and her character as a poet. Dickinson emerges...

Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot's early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America.

Miller challenges...

A major reinterpretation, T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons takes Eliot at his word in his reiterated statements that The Waste Land was not a "criticism of the contemporary world" but a personal "grouse against life." It is the first critical work to investigate in depth the sources of the poem in Eliot's life, with particular attention to Eliot's "Calamus"-like attachment to a French youth during Eliot's graduate year in Paris, his subsequent precipitate (and disastrous) marriage following the death of his young French friend in World War I, and...

Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot's early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America.

Miller challenges...

Writing and composing with honesty and humanism, Lucille Clifton is known for her themes of the body, family, community, politics, womanhood, and the spirit. While much of her work deals with the African American experience, she does not limit herself to that perspective, addressing topics common to all women, to all people. This timely and important biography will give readers a glimpse into the life and work of this important and revered African American poet, writer, and educator, exploring themes that run throughout her writing, as well as the personal obstacles she faced and overcame....

Taking seriously the commonplace that a man is known by the company he keeps--and particularly by the company he keeps over his lifetime--one can learn more about just about anyone by learning more about his friends. By applying this notion to Shakespeare, this book offers insight into the life of the most famous playwright in history, and one of the most elusive figures in literature. The book consists of sketches of Shakespeare's contact and relationships with the people known to have been close friends or acquaintances, revealing aspects of the poet's life by emphasizing ways in which...

This is a book about a writer, Islamic fundamentalism, mythmaking, and international literary politics. It is the story of Taslima Nasreen, a former medical doctor and protest writer who shot to international fame in 1993 at the age of thirty-four after she was accused of blasphemy by religious fanatics in Bangladesh and her book "Shame" was banned. In order to escape a warrant for her arrest, the controversial writer went underground and, as the official story has it, fled to the West where she became a human rights celebrity, a female version of Salman Rushdie. Taslima Nasreen's name...

Gregorio Cortez Lira, a ranchhand of Mexican parentage, was virtually unknown until one summer day in 1901 when he and a Texas sheriff, pistols in hand, blazed away at each other after a misunderstanding. The sheriff was killed and Gregorio fled immediately, realizing that in practice there was one law for Anglo-Texans, another for Texas-Mexicans. The chase, capture, and imprisonment of Cortez are high drama that cannot easily be forgotten. Even today, in the cantinas along both sides of the Rio Grande, Mexicans sing the praises of the great "sheriff-killer" in the ballad which they call...

A biography of the noted author, tracing her evolution from shy debutante to the social chronicler of her age.

This collection of letters chronicles a remarkable, long-term friendship between two women who, despite differences of religion and ethnicity, have followed remarkably parallel paths from their first adolescent meeting in their native Chile to their current lives in exile as writers, academics, and political activists in the United States. Spanning more than thirty years (1966-2000), Agosin's and Sepulveda's letters speak eloquently on themes that are at once personal and political--family life and patriarchy, women's roles, the loneliness of being a religious or cultural outsider,...

By now the world is familiar with the disastrous consequences of the ten year period (1966-1976) in China's history known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The mistakes of Mao Zedong's later years have been officially acknowledged, and the infamous Gang of Four publicly tried and sentence for their crimes. But on the cultural front the thaw had no sooner come than gone. A campaign against what is regarded as "spiritual pollution" is being waged to inhibit free expression among creative writers.

Thousands of scholars, authors, respected professors and academicians, who as...

A love goddess who was imprisoned and betrayed by love, a wife who returned again and again to her childhood home, a mother who left her children, a writer who preferred silence, Dagny Juel Przybyszewska existed in a borderland between myth and reality. Born into an upper-class Norwegian family in 1867, she died at the age of thirty-three, estranged from everyone and everything she had known, shot by a neurotic young man in a hotel room in Tiflis near the Black Sea. He wrote, "She was not of this world, she was far too ethereal for anyone to understand her true...

In this wry, judiciously balanced, and thoroughly engaging book, Galya Diment explores the complicated and fascinating relationship between Vladimir Nabokov and his Cornell colleague Marc Szeftel who, in the estimate of many, served as the prototype for the gentle protagonist of the novel Pnin. She offers astute comments on Nabokov's fictional process in creating Timogey Pnin and addresses hotly debated questions and long-standing riddles in Pnin and its history.

Between the two of them, Nabokov and Szeftel embodied much of the complexity and variety of the Russian postrevolution...

In his prize-winning memoir, Reconciliation Road, John Marshall recounts a road trip around America in search of the truth about his famous grandfather General S. L. A. (Slam) Marshall, author of Pork Chop Hill. In the process he comes to terms with his own past and that of others whose families were torn apart by the Vietnam War.