Posted on

Ruined By Reading

A Life in Books

Author: Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Publisher: Beacon Press

ISBN: 0807071005

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 128

View: 9249

A Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book of 1996 'Without books how could I have become myself?' In this wonderfully written meditation, Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers deeply felt insight into why we read and how what we read shapes our lives. An enchanting celebration of the printed word. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Posted on

George Washington: A Life in Books

Author: Kevin J. Hayes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 0190456698

Category: History

Page: 544

View: 3710

When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the great minds of early America. George Washington, instead, is toasted with accolades regarding his solid common sense and strength in battle. Indeed, John Adams once snobbishly dismissed him as "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation." Yet Adams, as well as the majority of the men who knew Washington in his life, were unaware of his singular devotion to self-improvement. Based on a comprehensive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin J. Hayes corrects this misconception and reconstructs in vivid detail the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of Washington. Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt an acute sense of embarrassment about his relative lack of formal education and cultural sophistication, and in this sparkling literary biography, Hayes illustrates just how tirelessly Washington worked to improve. Beginning with the primers, forgotten periodicals, conduct books, and classic eighteenth-century novels such as Tom Jones that shaped Washington's early life, Hayes studies Washington's letters and journals, charting the many ways the books of his upbringing affected decisions before and during the Revolutionary War. The final section of the book covers the voluminous reading that occurred during Washington's presidency and his retirement at Mount Vernon. Throughout, Hayes examines Washington's writing as well as his reading, from The Journal of Major George Washington through his Farewell Address. The sheer breadth of titles under review here allow readers to glimpse Washington's views on foreign policy, economics, the law, art, slavery, marriage, and religion-and how those views shaped the young nation.. Ultimately, this sharply written biography offers a fresh perspective on America's Father, uncovering the ideas that shaped his intellectual journey and, subsequently, the development of America.
Posted on

Gissing, a life in books

Author: John Halperin

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

ISBN: N.A

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 426

View: 8532

Gissing: A Life in Books is widely regarded as a definitive biography of this last great Victorian novelist.
Posted on

A Life in Books

The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley : an Illuminated Novel

Author: Warren Lehrer

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: 9781939621023

Category: Fiction

Page: 377

View: 508

"A Life In Books is an illuminated novel containing 101 books within it, all written by Lehrer's protagonist, author Bleu Mobley, who finds himself in prison looking back on his life and career. Mobley's autobiography/apologia is paired with a review of all 101 of his books. Each book is represented by its first-edition cover design and catalogue copy, and more than a third of his books are excerpted. The resulting retrospective contrasts the published writings (which read like short stories) with the author's confessional memoir, forming a most unusual portrait of a well-intentioned, obsessively inventive (but ethically challenged) visionary."--Publisher description.
Posted on

Nicholas Rubakin

A Life for Books

Author: Alfred Erich Senn

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Authors, Russian

Page: 79

View: 4847

Analyse: Biographie de N.A. Rubakin (1862-1946) qui vécut dans le canton de Vaud de 1908 à sa mort ; ses rapports avec diverses personnalités vaudoises et sa collaboration à certains journaux romands.
Posted on

Edmund Wilson

A Life in Literature

Author: Lewis M. Dabney

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 1466810440

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 656

View: 5167

From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history (Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life--a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others--in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and work. Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a deep commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Along the way, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained--in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity--a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson will be recognized as the lasting biography of this brilliant man whose life reflected so much of the cultural, social, and human experience of a turbulent century.
Posted on

Low Profile

A Life in the World of Books

Author: Frank Herrmann

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Antiquarian booksellers

Page: 398

View: 8708

Posted on

Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books

Author: David Whittle

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 1351572970

Category: Music

Page: 336

View: 2343

Under his real name, Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978) wrote concert music and the scores for almost 50 feature films, including some of the most enduring British comedies of the twentieth century, amongst them a number in the series started by Doctor in the House and the first six Carry On films. Under the pseudonym of Edmund Crispin he enjoyed equal success as an author, writing nine highly acclaimed detective novels and a number of short crime stories, as well as compiling anthologies of science fiction which helped to increase the profile of the genre. A close friend of both Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, Montgomery did much to encourage their work. In this first biography of Montgomery, David Whittle draws on interviews with people who knew the writer and composer. These interviews, together with in-depth research, provide great insight into the development of Montgomery as a crime fiction writer and as a composer in the ever-demanding world of films. During the late 1950s and early '60s these demands were to prove too much for Montgomery. Alcoholism combined with the onset of osteoporosis and a retreat into a semi-reclusive lifestyle resulted in him writing and composing virtually nothing during the last 15 years of his life. David Whittle examines the reasons for Montgomery's early and rapid decline in this thoroughly researched and engagingly written biography.
Posted on

Margaret Forster

A Life in Books

Author: Kathleen Jones

Publisher: Book Mill

ISBN: 9780957433212

Category:

Page: N.A

View: 5216

Biographer Kathleen Jones skilfully traces Margaret Forster's non-conforming career: her Carlisle upbringing and its working-class expectations, the competing demands of work and family, and the business of writing fact and fiction - with all the overlaps between the two.
Posted on

The Book Shopper

A Life in Review

Author: Murray Browne

Publisher: Paul Dry Books

ISBN: 1589880560

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 215

View: 8459

In search of a good book? Browne provides rich leads and much wit. Go, shop, read!
Posted on

A Life of Books

The Story of D.W. Thorpe Pty. Ltd., 1921-1987

Author: N.A

Publisher: Stephen Digby

ISBN: 0646396110

Category: Booksellers and bookselling

Page: 326

View: 6752

Posted on

This I Believe

Gleanings from a Life in Literature

Author: F. Sionil José

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: 9789718845424

Category: Literary Collections

Page: 47

View: 7514

Posted on

Welty

A Life in Literature

Author: Albert J. Devlin

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

ISBN: 9781604730203

Category: Literary Collections

Page: 322

View: 6851

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Eudora Welty's first important publication, this special collection of critical essays celebrates her achievement as an incomparable literary artist. Since 1936, when "Death of a Traveling Salesman" was published, the excellence of her stories, novels, essays and collections has been giving unceasing acclaim, and she has become one of the most honored and most esteemed of American writers. The essays in this collection convey the scholarly pleasure one finds in studying the works of Eudora Welty. Although they employ varying critical methodologies, pleasure is at the source of the examinations published in this book. In these essays, forma, mythic, and thematic criticism from a variety of scholars offers fresh access to A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and Delta Wedding. One bibliographical study included shows Welty to be keenly attuned to the nuances of meaning during the writing and revising of The Optimist's Daughter, deepening, clarifying, making more precise a novel of inestimable personal feeling. In another essay, Welty's close attention to the world is examined in relation to an early story "At the Landing," to the remarkable photography of One Time, One Place, and to her recent memoir, One Writer's Beginnings. Also included is a study of Eudora Welty in relation to Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish writer. A new interview with Miss Welty, which unifies this collection, and a checklist of Welty materials that updates Welty scholarship enhance this volume and bring further scholarly acknowledgement to this celebrated author's significant artistic stature and preeminent literary worth.
Posted on

Teaching Life

Letters from a Life in Literature

Author: Dale Salwak

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

ISBN: 1587297574

Category: Education

Page: 200

View: 2024

Part epistolary memoir, part handbook, Teaching Life reflects on more than three decades of teaching literature and touching the lives of students. Both a reflection on a life in literature and a primer on teaching as a vocation, this soul-stirring work also provides behind-the-scenes stories of many of the authors who have influenced Dale Salwak’s career. Written in response to the sudden death of one of his students, who died tragically in an automobile accident on her way to Salwak’s office to talk over her career plans, Teaching Life is an effort to impart lessons to the next generation of teachers: “It was the suddenness of her death, I think, along with the utter loss of so much potential, which struck me forcibly, and I found myself wondering if anything I had said in class had made a difference in her too-short life or, for that matter, in the lives of any of my students.” By turns analytical, reflective, and exhortatory, Teaching Life unselfconsciously captures the fascination, enlightenment, and sheer joy that literary studies can offer professors and students. It also implicitly speaks to society's prevailing—and disturbing—prejudice against the profession.
Posted on

Stanley Marcus

A Life with Books

Author: David R. Farmer

Publisher: TCU Press

ISBN: 9780875651477

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 149

View: 6973

Drawn largely from the extensive personal papers of Stanley Marcus, now housed in the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, Stanley Marcus: A Life with Books sparkles with the names of literary history, most but not all of them Texans - Tom Lea, Henry Nash Smith, J. Evetts Haley, Alfred Knopf, Jose Cisneros, Elizabeth Ann McMurray and McMurray's Personal Bookstore, E. L. DeGolyer, Paul Horgan, and a host of others. David Farmer chronicles Marcus' early fascination with books during his Harvard years, his founding of the Book Club of Texas, his friendship with J. Frank Dobie and his working relationship with El Paso's Carl Hertzog, his own books - Minding the Store and Quest for the Best, and his Somesuch Press, noted for publishing exquisite miniature books.