Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Literary Figures

This book was first published in 1947 with the subtitle "Sketches Among the Ruins of Italy, Greece, and England," and had been out of print for many years. It provides an informative and vivid account if these countries of postwar Europe.

Like Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction, this poignant memoir of his childhood in the household and rabbinical court of his father is full of spirits and demons, washerwomen and rabbis, beggars and rich men. This rememberance of Singer's pious father, his rational yet adoring mother, and the never-ending parade of humanity that marched through their home is a portrait of a magnificent writer's childhood self and of the world, now gone, that formed him.

The Torch in My Ear is the account of Canetti's young manhood, of his arrival in Vienna in the early 1920s, of his schooling, and of the beginning of his life as a writer.

Edmund Wilson turned forty-five in 1940, and this volume shows the extent to which he was reappraising his life in the decade to follow - saying goodbye to the drifting of the 1920s and the Marxism of the 1930s.

The letters of Anton Chekhov, like those of Flaubert, are astonishing in their immense range and in their literary quality. Beginning in 1885, when he was twenty-five, and ending with his death less than twenty years later, the correspondence testifies to an extraordinary career. Chekhov was not only a writer but a critic, a doctor, a traveler, a devoted lover and brother. He brings his passions and his immense talent to every subject. As witty and observant as his great plays and stories, Chekhov's letters exemplify his artistry and humanity.

In 1890, though already suffering from...

Love and Exile contains the three volumes of the Nobel Prize Winner's spiritual autobiography, covering his childhood in a rabbinical household in Poland, his young manhood in Warsaw and his beginning as a writer, and his emigration to New York before the outbreak of war, with the concomitant displacement of a Yiddish writer in a strange land.

This is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties and it is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Special Award

"I have come to think that the true likeness of Flannery O'Connor will be painted by herself, a self-portrait in words, to be found in her letters . . . There she stands, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word."--Sally Fitzgerald, from the Introduction

A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.

This "tour de force of analysis" (Joel Agee) examines the life and work of the prolific, visionary writer, painter and critic. Kemp finds in Ruskin's life -- which spanned the same years as Queen Victoria's and thus embodied the Victorian era itself -- a faithful mirror of the history and psychological evolution of his age.

Like Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography written thirty years earlier, A Year of the Hunter is a "search for self-definition." A diary of one year in the Nobel laureate's life, 1987-88, it concerns itself as much with his experience of remembering as with the actual events that shape his days. Shuttling between observations of the present and reconstructions of the past, he attempts to answer the unstated question: Given his poet's personality and his historical circumstances, has he managed to live his life decently?

From Milosz's thoughts on the Catholic...

From several thousand letters, written over fifty years - from 1928, when she was seventeen, to the day of her death, in Boston in 1979 - Robert Giroux has selected over five hundred and has written a detailed and informative introduction. One Art takes us behind Bishop's formal sophistication and reserve, displaying to the full the gift for friendship, the striving for perfection, and the passionate, questing, rigorous spirit that made her a great poet.

This extraordinary collection of correspondence by Paul Bowles spans eight decades and provides an evolving portrait of an artist renowned for his privacy. From his earliest extant letter, written at the age of four, to his precocious effusions to Aaron Copeland and to Gertrude Stein; from his meditations on mescaline as relayed to Ned Rorem, to his intensely moving letters to Jane Bowles during her illness, In Touch fills in the lacunae left by previous biographers and offers a rare look at the many aspects of Bowles's brilliant career--as composer, novelist, short-story master, travel...

A modern biography of an ambivalent rebel and irreverent feminist who became, in spite of herself, one of our most popular authors.

The autobiography of Cuba's finest poet, whose condemnation by the Castro regime became a cause celebre.

"Intellectuals alienated from the Castro government who have told their stories tend to sound spiteful and illiberal, like Cabrera Infante; Padilla takes pains to do better. His style is clear, sometimes witty, often bitter, persevering but not burdensome, and evincing an occasional affinity with both Orwell and Hemingway." - Publishers Weekly

In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, working in Russia for the British Foreign Office, met Anna Akhmatova almost by chance in what was then Leningrad. The brief time they spent together one long November evening was a transformng experience for both, and has become a cardinal moment in modern literary history.

For Akhmatova, Berlin was a "guest from the future," her ideal reader outside the nightmare of Soviet life and a link with a lost Russian world; he became a figure in her cryptic masterpiece "Poem without a Hero." For Berlin, this "most memorable" meeting with the beautiful poet of genius...

Winner of the PEN/Voelcker career achievement award in poetry

Misgivings is C. K. William's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, inner conflict, and, finally, love. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is a full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true.

Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--angry, demanding, addicted to the tension he created with the people he loved; a man who could recite the...

The classic and deeply moving memoir by Pablo Neruda, the most widely read political poet of our time and winner of the Nobel Prize

The south of Chile was a frontier wilderness when Pablo Neruda was born in 1904. In these memoirs he retraces his bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and in Mexico; and his service as a Chilean senator. Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over...

When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.

For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, and...