Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life
10 best books like Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (Andrew Motion): E. M. Forster: A Life, Byron: Life and Legend, The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, John Donne: The Reformed Soul, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, T.S. Eliot, Hawthorne: A Life, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams
| 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 | Fiona MacCarthy |
| ISBN | 0571179975 |
An excellent biography of Byron - and I've read a few by now. To be honest, during Byron's early years I was feeling as if I'd read it all (or most of it) before. But during the later years, especially once he reaches Venice, the book really came into its own. I felt there was more depth, detail and interest...
| 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 | 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 | John Stubbs |
| ISBN | 0393062600 |
Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from Plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns...
| 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...
| Author | Brenda Wineapple |
| ISBN | 0812972910 |
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 0375708383 |
Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium...
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...
Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive
| Author | Neil Astley |
| ISBN | 1852246758 |
Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley's Staying Alive, which became Britain's most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers who've...
| Author | John Keats |
| ISBN | 0674018419 |
The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time,...
| Author | Walter Jackson Bate |
| ISBN | 0674478258 |
The life of Keats provides a unique opportunity for the study of literary greatness and of what permits or encourages its development. Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty...
| Author | Ian Hamilton |
| ISBN | 0747536406 |
In trying to research the details of J.D. Salinger's life for this book, Ian Hamilton forced the writer out of his reclusive hideaway to challenge his discoveries in an American court of law. When Ian Hamilton set out in 1983 to write a biography of Salinger, he knew that there would be difficulties. Just...
Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography
| Author | Arthur Hobson Quinn |
| ISBN | 0801857309 |
Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"...
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...
| Author | David Herbert Donald |
| ISBN | 0316189529 |
Thomas Wolfe, one of the giants of twentieth-century American fiction, is also one of the most misunderstood of our major novelists. A man massive in his size, his passions, and his gifts, Wolfe has long been considered something of an unconscious genius, whose undisciplined flow of prose was shaped...
| Author | George Orwell |
| ISBN | 1567921361 |
In Front of Your Nose features Orwell's final writings, including extracts from his manuscript notebook, as well as details of his remarriage and adoption of a son, notes on the writing and publication of Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Graham Greene, an examination...
| Author | Nicholas Shakespeare |
| ISBN | 0385498306 |
Award-winning novelist Nicholas Shakespeare has written the definitive biography of one of the most influential literary figures of our time: Bruce Chatwin, whose works' strangely compelling combination of research, first-hand experience, myth, and mystification may have been the real substance...
| Author | Norman Sherry |
| ISBN | 0142004200 |
Graham Greene was one of the most guarded and complex literary figures of our time. In the first volume of Norman Sherry’s celebrated biography, Greene’s early life is explored through letters, diaries, and hundreds of interviews, including a breakdown in his early teens, his years at Oxford,...
Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences
| Author | James R. Mellow |
| ISBN | 0201626209 |
"This is a magisterial retelling of who did what with and to whom--Ezra Pound, the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys, Getrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, Robert McAlmon, Bryher, H.D., and all the other major and minor players whose personal histories gave the era the aura of golden...
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...
