Robert Frost: A Life
10 best books like Robert Frost: A Life (Jay Parini): Tolstoy, E. M. Forster: A Life, Byron: Life and Legend, Keats, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, Lives of the Poets, The Life of Emily Dickinson, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame
| Author | Henri Troyat |
| ISBN | 0802137687 |
Leo Tolstoy embodies the most extraordinary contradictions. He was a wealthy aristocrat who preached the virtues of poverty and the peasant life, a misogynist who wrote Anna Karenina, and a supreme writer who declared, "Literature is rubbish." From Tolstoy's famously bad marriage to his enormously...
| 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 | Andrew Motion |
| ISBN | 0226542408 |
Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters,...
| Author | Virginia Spencer Carr |
| ISBN | 0820325228 |
The Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented,...
| 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 | Michael Schmidt |
| ISBN | 0375706046 |
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
In this stunning volume of epic breadth, Michael Schmidt connects the lives and works of more than 300 poets over the last 700 years--spanning distant shores from Scotland to Australia to the Caribbean, all sharing the English language.
Schmidt...
| 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 | Michael Gorra |
| ISBN | 0871404087 |
Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James 's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady...
| Author | Brad Gooch |
| ISBN | 0394571185 |
Received this book from friend Phyllis years ago and never read it until this month. Gooch's biography of poet and Musuem of Modern Art curator Frank O'Hara is informative and well-researched and documented. Gooch also incorporates many excerpts from O'Hara's poetry to show how the poet's experiences...
| Author | Linda Gray Sexton |
| ISBN | 0316782084 |
Linda Gray Sexton's critically acclaimed memoir is an honest, unsparing account of the anguish and fierce love that bound a brilliant, difficult mother and the daughter she left behind. Linda Sexton was twenty-one when her mother killed herself, and now she looks back, remembers, and tries to come...
| Author | Deirdre Bair |
| ISBN | 0671741802 |
This definitive biography is based on five years of interviews with de Beauvoir, and is written with her full cooperation. Bair penetrates the mystique of this brilliant and often paradoxical woman, who has been called one of the great minds of the 20th century, and surely, one of the most famously unconventional...
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 | Suzanne Marrs |
| ISBN | 0151009147 |
I heard mediocre things about this when it came out so I didn't bother, but I found it on a sale table so picked it up and found out for myself that it is mediocre.
It's useful for facts facts facts, and so it will become yet another one of those bios I flip through the index to find out what I want to find...
| 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...
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
| Author | John Felstiner |
| ISBN | 0300089228 |
Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers...
| 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 | Morton N. Cohen |
| ISBN | 0679745629 |
Okay, there are a lot of theories about who CLD really was, what he was like, whether he was a pedophile or did drugs. A lot of people will downgrade books because they don't go along with their pet theories.
Fact is, this is a good biography that gives a lot of insight into the man. Whether it gives...
| 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...
| Author | Claire Harman |
| ISBN | 0679446583 |
Claire Harman's full-scale biography of Fanny Burney, the first literary woman novelist and a true child of eighteenth-century England and the Enlightenment, is rich with insights and pleasures as it brings us into the extraordinary life (1752-1840) of the woman Virginia Woolf called ìthe mother...
| Author | Michael S. Reynolds |
| ISBN | 0393317765 |
Michael Reynolds recreates the milieu that forged one of America's greatest and most influential writers. He reveals the fraught foundations of Hemingway's persona: his father's self-destructive battle with depression and his mother's fierce independence and spiritualism. He brings Hemingway...
| Author | Douglas Murray |
| ISBN | 0340767707 |
There is a vogue these days for biographies of minor, peripheral characters who lived on the margins of literary greatness: Tennyson's wife, for instance, or Dickens' mistress.
This new biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensbury and, most scandalously, the lover...
