Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
10 best books like Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (Michael Gorra): One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, Tolstoy: A Russian Life, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Byron: Life and Legend, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, John Donne: The Reformed Soul, The Life of Emily Dickinson
| Author | Jay Parini |
| ISBN | 0060935553 |
“Nothing less than spellbinding . . . It’s an eye-opener. Anecdotal without being tawdry, analytical without being academic, it captures the essence of Faulkner’s life with the narrative drive of a novel.” — Houston Chronicle
“A splendid life of William Faulkner . . . Not...
| Author | Rosamund Bartlett |
| ISBN | 1846681383 |
A hundred years ago in November 1910 Count Leo Tolstoy died on a remote Russian railway station, attended by the world's media, taken ill as he was finally attempting to escape his decadent (as he saw it), aristocratic family life.
Tolstoy has been universally recognised as a colossus of world...
| Author | Hermione Lee |
| ISBN | 0701184957 |
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower, was...
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
| Author | Claire Tomalin |
| ISBN | 0140167617 |
Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day.
She published "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement;...
| 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 | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0307595846 |
A dazzling new collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers.
It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of...
| 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 | Carole Seymour-Jones |
| ISBN | 0385499930 |
This astonishing portrait of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of poet T.S. Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record. In so doing, Painted...
| 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 | 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 | Christopher E.G. Benfey |
| ISBN | 1594201609 |
A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought
At the close of the Civil War, the United States took a deep breath to lick wounds and consider the damage done. A Summer of Hummingbirds...
| Author | Donald Rayfield |
| ISBN | 0810117959 |
Anton Chekhov's life was short, intense, and dominated by battles, both with his dependents and with the tuberculosis that killed him at age forty-four. The traditional image of Chekhov is that of the restrained artist torn between medicine and literature. But Donald Rayfield's biography reveals...
Muriel Spark: The Biography
Recently I have re-discovered Muriel Spark’s work and have enjoyed becoming re-acquainted with her novels. Realising I knew very little about her life, I decided to read her biography and, having done so, feel it was very well researched and covered both her work, and life, well.
Muriel...
| Author | Jenny Uglow |
| ISBN | 0374147515 |
Winner of the Portico Prize
Shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the Year High-spirited, witty and passionate, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age, including Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters. This biography traces Elizabeth's...
| 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 | Leon Edel |
| ISBN | 0006548687 |
This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist...
| Author | James Wood |
| ISBN | 0375752633 |
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov,...
| Author | R.W.B. Lewis |
| ISBN | 0880640200 |
This biography of Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes when it came out. And I am only on p. 31 at this moment, but I am already finding a lot of thud moments in the writing. His big interpretations seem labored, prosaic, and debatable. I am simultaneously reading Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary...
| Author | Claudia Roth Pierpont |
| ISBN | 0374280517 |
Here, at last, is the story of Philip Roth's creative life. Roth Unbound is not a biography--though it contains a wealth of previously undisclosed biographical details and unpublished material--but something ultimately more rewarding: the exploration of a great writer through his art.
Claudia...
| Author | Henry James |
| ISBN | 1419178695 |
He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips -- sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feelings that had possessed him for the three...
| Author | Reiner Stach |
| ISBN | 0151007527 |
This is the second of a three-volume, definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Eighty years after his death in 1924, Kafka remains one of the most intriguing figures in the history of world literature. Now, after more than a decade of research, working with over four thousand pages of journal entries, letters,...
