Hawthorne: A Life
10 best books like Hawthorne: A Life (Brenda Wineapple): E. M. Forster: A Life, Shelley: The Pursuit, Melville: His World and Work, The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street, David Hockney: The Biography, 1937-1975, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Charles Dickens, The Life of Emily Dickinson, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, T.S. Eliot
| Author | P.N. Furbank |
| ISBN | 0156286513 |
I’ve owned this two-in-one volume for years and finally opened it after Jasmine's wonderful essay-review of Maurice had me thinking of Forster’s probable loneliness. Reading this made me feel better about that aspect of his life: yes, there was much (mostly physical) loneliness in his life,...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 1590170377 |
Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and...
| Author | Andrew Delbanco |
| ISBN | 0375702970 |
If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded...
| Author | Charles Nicholl |
| ISBN | 0670018503 |
A brilliantly drawn detective story with entirely new insights into Shakespeare's life
In 1612, William Shakespeare gave evidence in a court case at Westminster and it is the only occasion on which his actual spoken words were recorded. The case seems routine a dispute over an unpaid marriage...
| Author | Christopher Simon Sykes |
| ISBN | 0385531443 |
Drawing on exclusive and unprecedented access to David Hockney’s extensive archives, notebooks, and paintings, interviews with family, friends, and on Hockney himself, Christopher Simon Sykes provides a colorful and intimate portrait of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth...
| Author | Lyndall Gordon |
| ISBN | 0393320936 |
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full...
| Author | Jane Smiley |
| ISBN | 0670030775 |
With the delectable wit, unforgettable characters, and challenging themes that have won her a Pulitzer Prize and national bestseller status, Jane Smiley naturally finds a kindred spirit in the author of classics such as Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol. As "his novels shaped his life as much...
| Author | Richard B. Sewall |
| ISBN | 0674530802 |
The life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall's monumental biography of the great American poet (1830-1886), won the National Book Award when it was originally published in two volumes. Now available in a one-volume edition, it has been called "by far the best and most complete study of the poet's...
| Author | Benita Eisler |
| ISBN | 0679740856 |
In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context...
| Author | Peter Ackroyd |
| ISBN | 0140171126 |
In the twentieth century, no Anglo-American poet or critic has matched the influence of Thomas Stearns Eliot. Despite his political and religious conservatism, Eliot was among the most innovative of the literary modernists, a figure to be reckoned with by admirers and critics alike. In his Whitbread...
The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams
| Author | Donald Spoto |
| ISBN | 0306808056 |
This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Night of the...
| Author | Alfred Habegger |
| ISBN | 0812966015 |
Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography,...
| Author | Cherie Blair |
| ISBN | 1408700980 |
After reading her life story I have tremendous admiration for Cherie Blair. She is a positive role model for all females of any age, religion or race. She is the mother of four, a judge, a barrister in her own right, the head of many charities for women and children, an author, a singer and the wife of one of...
George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals--and a Few Unappreciative ...
| Author | Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. |
| ISBN | 1400063981 |
Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. For more than fifty years, his friends made a circle whose circumference was vast and whose center was a fashionable tenement on New York’s East Seventy-second street. Taxi drivers, hearing his address, would ask, “Isn’t...
Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy
| Author | Jeffrey Meyers |
| ISBN | 0815410387 |
This biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), a giant of American literature who invented both the horror and detective genres, is a portrait of extremes: a disinherited heir, a brilliant but exploited author and editor, a man who veered radically from temperance to rampant debauchery, and an agnostic...
| Author | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| ISBN | 1590170423 |
On July 28, 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife Sophia and daughters Una and Rose left their house in Western Massachusetts to visit relatives near Boston. Hawthorne and his five-year-old son Julian stayed behind. How father and son got along over the next three weeks is the subject of this tender and...
The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald
| Author | Arthur Mizener |
| ISBN | 1199457485 |
This is exactly the book that I wanted to read about the writer, F.Scott Fitzgerald. It not only provided an immersive detailing of his life, but also did an in-depth exploration of much of his writing, providing an even greater insight to his stories.
When I was growing up, the celebrity author...
| Author | John Matteson |
| ISBN | 0393068056 |
A brilliant writer and a fiery social critic, Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was perhaps the most famous American woman of her generation. Outspoken and quick-witted, idealistic and adventurous, she became the leading female figure in the transcendentalist movement, wrote a celebrated column...
| Author | Kenneth Silverman |
| ISBN | 0060923318 |
Poe. Ugh! Nevermore! Just kidding. Sort of. I’ll always read the great stories over and over again. They are, to my mind, essential parts of American fiction, and foundational material when considering the history of the Weird Tale. But the life of the man, after reading Kenneth Silverman’s biography,...
| Author | Megan Marshall |
| ISBN | 0618711694 |
Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters — and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day — has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era of creative...
| Author | David Halberstam |
| ISBN | 0394450256 |
The Pulitzer prize-winning newsman's analysis of Kennedy's ideological journey toward increasing radicalism and a personal account of his subsequent successes (and single major defeat) along the campaign trail. Halberstam shows how Kennedy in his role as leader of the honorable
opposition...
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams - The Early Years 1903 - 1940
| Author | Gary Giddins |
| ISBN | 0316886459 |
First off, "Pocketful of Dreams" is a balanced biography. It would be nice if this didn't have to be noted, but especially in the case of Crosby, when his children and step-children have written scathing or adoring memoirs, it is refreshing when a biographer explores all aspects of a person, the strengths...
I'm old enough to remember this scandal. In the 1970's, Clifford Irving conned the world into thinking he had secretly worked with the notoriously reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes on his autobiography. And he came very, very close to getting away with it. Irving made the mistake of being very hard...
